


firelight

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Ben is obligated to go camping with Poe and Finn's wedding party and meets trail guide Rey, Camping, Crying Kink, Death of a pet, Dog Dies, Eventual Smut, F/M, Grieving, Kylo explicitly has a kink for when Rey cries, Minor Character Death, Of old age, Pining, Smut, Tent Sex, and tearing him apart emotionally, he's like super super old, this is the saddest camping fic I'm calling it now, two legal adults role-play as camper/counselor if that would bother you figured I'd tag it, who is also in the wedding party
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-08-22 12:57:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16598342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: Ben Solo, and his notoriously short fuse, finds himself dragged along on Poe and Finn's joint "Bachelor Weekend" Camping Trip. Organizing the trip is Rey; who he can't tell actually hates him or not. But because of all these interconnected people, and Poe knowing just about everything there is to know about his family, he finds out he's not getting away from his past when he's isolated with fragments of it alone in the woods for a weekend.Especially since Rey won't let it go.





	1. Chapter 1

_ “Rey’s our guide,” _ Kaydel has a lilt that _seems_ like she’s kidding, but she and Rose and the aforementioned guide form a trio of flannel-clad Graces in the backseat, heads tilted together to fit into a selfie. 

Rey, freckled and fresh-faced and bright, looks certainly capable of guiding a tour through a pristine college campus. He can picture her cheerfully rattling off anecdotes of mascot statues getting stolen or the best time to load up on chicken tenders in the dining hall during finals week to an audience of polite and anxious laughter on a photogenic walking path; but Finn and Poe are not taking them all on a college tour for their Bachelor Weekend.

She smiles for the camera in a bashful, on-the-spot kind of way, which is ridiculous for someone so pretty, and with a touch of a fingertip gets filtered into someone’s story. He leans heavily against the window behind them, ducking out of frame, but he doesn’t think he was meant to be in the picture or that anyone notices.

Rey is guiding them through some pretty rough mountains this weekend, Ben reluctantly included, so the chipper attitude keeps making him blink twice at everything she says. It’s with quiet, firm authority, the kind of person in the group who does not have to raise her voice to be listened to. That terrifies him, because he only lowers his voice to be ignored. 

All because Poe is engaged and Leia bribed him to make Ben a groomsman, and all Poe wants this weekend is a joint wedding-party debauched camping trip like they’re all still in college. A final bacchanal. Rey is the most seasoned camper and a Groom’s Maid for Finn, or a Best Maid of Honor. The roles are unclear to him in the levels of irony and gender subversion. She works at a camping goods store, loves Finn more than even Poe (she has said this three times since they picked her up from her building this morning) and has only looked at him once. 

Pointedly. 

Making his palms sweat.

Only to ask  _ “Are you going to be comfortable walking in those boots?”  _ and made him feel like a fucking idiot. He has big feet, he can’t really hide the motorcycle boots from her examining stare, but it’s too late for that anyway. 

“They have enough mileage that this isn’t going to be a problem,” he murmurs, and she cracks a smile he isn’t encouraging or mocking. He’s not good at reading these things, with women, it’s why most of his previous girlfriends never smiled. Made it easy. “You’ve got rainboots on, how’s it going to feel to be hiking in those?”

It comes out unintentionally sharp. And she raises her eyebrows first before looking away. Actively showing she’s not engaging. 

_ Oh, so she’s been warned about this. _

He wonders if there was like a separate, abridged wedding party dinner to brief them all on Ben Solo’s notoriously short fuse. Poe would know. He’s probably the most seasoned of navigators of it, an old pro. Finn is fine with the occasional tableside argument; he and Ben have ruined a Thanksgiving or two like that, which is surprising because they both bear the other no grudge and don’t even remember ever raising their voices to each other. 

The bystanders remember it differently. 

Kaydel and Rose were nice enough, but maybe too nice. 

Snap, Jess, and Nix are coming separately, the former two not until tomorrow. So he'll find out later how prepared they were about him being there. Maybe his mother just prepared them all a folder on _dealing with Ben._

Rey is examining, attentive, maybe too sharp. 

And he was too damn paranoid for entering into pre-established social hierarchies. 

She munches contentedly on trail mix instead, just the carefully selected peanuts and candies, stretching her legs over Rose’s lap as Kaydel and Rose protest -Rose the squashing, Kaydel the proximity to the state of her dirty Sorel rain boots- like this car with at least two people too many is the most natural habitat in the world.

She snaps her head back to look at him when he touches the sheepskin of her coat lining, right at the back of her neck. He doesn't know why he did that.

He clears his throat, the  _ Trunk Bitch _ , as Poe has been trying to trademark the whole trip, the only place his knees can spread out enough with the girls taking up the middle seat. 

“I’ve been meaning to get a sheepskin jacket,” he lies, as if he’d wear something so  _ fluffy _ over all his black clothes. “Is it warm?”

She smiles, the knot of hair on her head jiggling as she nods. She lifts her hands to twist it tighter and re-tie it. Blocking his view of her face from behind her. “Can’t leave home without it. If I had a blanket of this material, I’d never get out of bed.”

“You would lose your fucking mind; you need to be outside to breathe.  _ Rey is an outside cat, _ ” Finn shouts in disbelief from the front seat, and Rey kicks his hand, which is entwined with Poe’s from the passenger side. Poe yelps something about assaulting the driver, and everyone laughs. 

Kaydel lifts her phone once more for a selfie, and he tries to dodge again, press himself to the window with a hand over his face, but Rey ushers him to lean forward with a single gesture, openly calls his name. He can’t believe he finds himself leaning over the seat, but not smiling. She cups his far cheek to touch his closer one to hers as she smiles for the camera. Her fingers brush his scar, and he flinches. She seems to realize this, so they slide into his hair instead as an afterthought, cupped under his ear.

It is making a good show for Poe and Finn, he knows this. Participating. He's well versed in begrudging participation. It's why he's avoided it his entire adult life.

_ Outside Cats _ Kaydel narrates as she captions the picture. It seems like everything this weekend is getting a post. Rey leans close to examine the group shot, and laughs at the expression on her face, refers to the look in his own eyes as  _ murderous. _

Ben feels more uncomfortable, in their easy companionship, than anything else. Something lost in translation; but he’s curious. Wants to learn the meaning.

 

* * *

 

Rey gasps when he pulls his tent out of his pack. 

It’s a great spot. According to her, they can cook out right on the beach and pitch their tents on higher grounds. Not far from the car, which is packed with liquor, so they can rush back and forth for frequent trips. Looking down over where they’ll have the bonfire tonight, he’s impressed with her command of the space. Of nature. 

But she’s investigating his tent with a squinty, intense expression, and he would really like her to stop.

He bought the right fucking tent, he carefully researched this, but she was quick to correct when they were all setting up, to oversee his work. While he knelt in the dirt and pine needles to assemble it, she stood above him with a hand on his shoulder that was both patronizing and nurturing.

Monologuing. 

“...it’s going to be cold tonight, so check the side zips. And dress warmly, because...”

Her hip nudges him as she gives advice, it was pal-ish and brusque and makes him feel like she is trying to be his fucking tee-ball coach.

“State-of-the-art,” she muses, snapping the joints of a pole together with a noise not unlike a whip crack, “We’ve sold a lot in the shop this season. I’ve been  _ dying _ to get to sleep in one of these.”

“You don’t have to be nice to me,” he mutters, like he’s still in high school, and she falls silent. 

_ “Alright, good talk.” _

Ben turns over his shoulder to see Finn smiling at Rey, who seems relieved someone witnessed him shutting her down. She tosses him a thumbs-up in mock agreement. Saying nothing more.

Her commitment to not taking his bait is sphynx-like in her mystery. She clearly takes no shit. Yet she stomachs his easily, with an almost maternal patience. But now she's paying attention to Finn, and not pretending to be anyone mother. He likes that girl more. Sunny. Bright. Not as intimidating.

“You can see the inside of my tent any night," Finn drawls, and she punches at him with mock aggression.

And Rey’s laughing now, letting Finn sling an arm around her and lead her away.

He tries to swallow his bitterness at the whole exchange.

He had the right tent, he dressed warmly, he brought along exactly what he would be drinking that night, as Poe had insisted, and he never felt so out of place as when she is looking at him with that careful, unreadable expression.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a chance at reprieve that he burns through unintentionally; their guide declares everyone has to bring back an armful of firewood, because if they all split up it gets done faster. He bolts into the woods for a moment alone. Finn and Poe vanish to go neck. Rose and Kaydel are singing some improvised nonsense into Kaydel’s phone camera. 

And Rey.

Rey sneaks up on him, as always. Just when he had a moment to think about the grave mistake he has made.

“Hey,” she smiles, a thatch of dry twigs under one arm. Her boot is planted on a large stick, probably as thick as his arm, that she’s wedged at an angle into the dirt. It’s cracking, but not split. “I’m not getting this broken where I want it to, we can probably get three good pieces out of it, can you help?”

He, compulsive fixer that he is, draws close and gets a good feel of the stick. It’s a strong type of tree, but dry and brittle. It might feel good to break something, constructively. 

“Back up,” he warns, and snaps it over his leg in a swift motion. It does feel good. She laughs, taking the separate pieces from him, snapping the longer of the two another time by pressing her foot down at the center and pulling up with her arms. It’s warmer now that they’re all moving through the rough terrain, so her jacket is tied around her waist, and he can really see how strong her arms are. 

And then she ruins the moment he took to soften to her once again;

“It’s a little less messy this way,” she tells him, and he cringes, twisting into the trees again. She pads along beside him, gathering up the branches. “Less splinters.”

“Well, you seemed pretty set on that stick, when you could have just grabbed another one.”

She shrugs.

“I’ll burn it in your honor.”

The smile...he’s not a natural smiler, and the only ones he gets are from people paid to look happy to see him; receptionists and baristas and nurses. That or someone who wants something from his mother; groundbreaking female CEO, kind of a ballbuster, everyone’s hero. 

It’s not an easy feeling to him, especially with the mother he has, to be comforted by the schmoozing. It usually ends in someone asking for something other than him. 

Rey has set her attention on him. He doesn’t trust it.

And his arrangement to even be here is sort of an inside joke between Leia and Poe, said with smiles behind his back, that if Ben was in the wedding party Leia at least could have some distance legitimate connection to Poe, solidified forever. 

So Poe could be the son Ben never was, like they weren’t already pretending.

Rey is complicit in that connection. But then again, so is he.

“How’d you get so into camping?” he blurts out, just to change the subject. 

She looks a little crestfallen, when this should be a safe topic for her of all people. 

“Um, there’s summer programs. For foster kids. It’s easier to just send us to camp for three months than be there for a kid who’s basically a rental. If it was overnight, most of my foster parents went for it.” 

She’s hefting up a log half-submerged in pine needles as she says this. He watches, horrified. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, teaches life skills,” but from the way she looks at him she’s very carefully keeping the subject on  _ camping. _ “Survival stuff. How to take care of yourself. It felt good to make things, to build, to be self-reliant. Helped a lot with my confidence.  And I met Finn through one.  _ We used to date,” _ she whispers, her eyes sparkling like it was a big secret Finn was once in a relationship with a girl. 

He stands firmly, feet apart, while she gathers twigs like a little nesting bird.

“Scandalous. How does Poe feel about it?”

“He is  _ wildly _ jealous. We can never tell him I was Finn’s first kiss. We were thirteen. And that he didn’t talk to me for two weeks after it happened.”

Ben feels a shimmer of lightness at the thought of Finn fleeing the crime scene. “Ice Cream Social kind of first kiss?”

She laughs naturally, with a lightness of spirit. This is a person who looks for a reason to be happy.

“Closing campfire. We sat next to each other for the skits. He laid one on me, I punched him.”

“So that’s why he avoided you.”

She smirks crookedly, her arms filled with branches. 

His hands feel empty, useless. “Let me take those.”

She raises her eyebrows. Curling them defensively in her arms. “I’ve got them.”

Great. Now he’s offended her.

“You’re better at finding the good ones,” he blurts out, and she smiles again. But it barely covers how hard she’s breathing, is it her obvious discomfort about the foster care stuff? “I’ll carry.”

She can probably lift just as much as he can, which is saying something, but she drops the stack of firewood into his arms. 

“What about you? Is it in your blood to know exactly what sexy tent is going to impress all the nature guides?”

She swings the length of her foot to hit flat along the back of his calf. It’s unexpected. He stumbles, cursing. 

_ “Sorry,” _ they both blurt out at the same time. 

“Sorry,” she repeats. There’s a moment of silence. He’s scared to look at her face, but she’s quite serenely looking at the canopy of trees when he does dare a glance. She continues when she seems to have gotten her clarity from the forest.

“I just bond easily, when I want to. I forget I don’t know you. It’s a remnant of the...I imprint on people. Clearly I’m giving you too much attention.”

_ Please, _ he almost begs,  _ it is so much easier when I am invisible to girls like you. _

He decides to keep walking. She follows. So he talks now.

“Camping was like, by-threat-of-death  _ you have to go _ family bonding. I’d mostly read. Fool around in the woods, but it was like, kid fantasy stuff, not survival training. I liked canoeing, of all things, but mostly those trips were for bug bites and getting rained on. My dad handled all the technical stuff; he loved it.”

She smiles. “That sounds very nuclear. Don’t judge me for begging you for stories about it around the fire.”

“I don’t like to talk about it,” he admits slowly, because there’s no way to exposit this information without sounding like a complete jackass; “he died last year.”

Rey stills beside him, looking at the forest floor. 

“I know,” she murmurs. Looking up at him sadly. “I’m sorry. I…”

_ “How’d you know?” _

His tone, once careful, is now prickly. 

“I knew him, for a while before he passed. I didn’t want you to think I was just being nice to you because-”

She trots along behind him, but he’s immediately making a beeline back to the tents. Her levels of tolerance were conditional, clearly. Was he even in the wedding party at all for Leia, or now for Han?

“I met him through Poe a couple of years ago? He helped Finn with his college applications, like a second father to them, myself included, right until he died.”

He looks down at the firewood in his arms. Tightening his mouth in a firm line, he shakes his head. 

“It’s not a big deal. I know he’s...he was well loved, especially by everyone on this trip. But we didn’t have a good relationship. So you can...you and Finn can have him, if you want that memory of him. But you’re not getting it validated by me, when it wasn’t true.”

There is no weight to his tone. No grief. He can tell it scares her. 

_ This is why you don’t let good things close to you. _

Rey nods slowly. 

“People...are complicated, Ben. Even when they have some left behind who only remember them fondly. I’m sorry.”

She puts her hand gently on his shoulder. 

“How’s this year been?”

He shudders. “I’m fine.”

She very carefully tries to coax him to look in her eyes. Her brows raise encouragingly. 

“I don’t need...I don’t need to be protected from the truth. That was something that happened for a long time when I was a kid, and I spent most summers thinking my real parents were picking me up from camp at the end of the summer. I don’t know if it was everyone around me or my own fault I kept believing they’d finally be there to hear about archery and canoeing and sleeping under the stars. I’d just have rather...put off the pain of it. Have someone put me out of my misery. You don’t have to protect me from whatever you’re feeling. I don’t need Han the way you did. So if you want to talk…”

This cannot be happening. He meets a hot, kind girl who trails him long enough to establish she’s not repulsed by him, and she wants to talk of nothing but his dead father who couldn’t even speak to him the last year of his life. 

So he keeps walking.

He reaches the circle of stones in the middle of camp that will serve as the cooking fire, the big bonfire is going on the beach and there’s purchased fire-starters for that one. Too risky to leave it to the elements; wet forest easily spoiling plans.

Finn and Poe are not gathering firewood and are instead seated on a picnic table bench eating marshmallows. 

“Is everything okay?” Poe’s tone is careful, diplomatic, attentive. It is an old family tone, one he’s heard on his mother and father for decades. A  _ Managing-Ben Tone; _ for his quick lapses of anger and attitude, and he could punch something for its presence here, for this conversation. 

“We’re fine,” Rey smiles, waving a shy hand.  _ “And those marshmallows are for later.” _

Finn’s mouth is full “We’re keeping the bears from eating them.”

Poe snickers.

“Wexley’s not even here yet...”

Ben can’t listen to this; the in-jokes he doesn't get, it’s just  _ noise.  _

Rey lowers her voice, turning back to him with a hushed tone. “I’m sorry. I just thought, the stuff I told you…”

She thought it was an even trade. Exchanging it like baseball cards.  _ Here’s my pain for yours.  _

He grunts, kicking a loose stick towards the pile he’s dropped. His hands fist in his jacket pockets.

There’s something in the way that she’s looking at him that he perceives, for a second, as an invitation for a kiss. Which is absurd. Maybe he just wants to kiss her to shut her up, or punish-fuck her over his dad being dead and never forgiving him until she _screamed._ Wouldn’t be the first time he’d tried that with a younger woman making her eyes glow sweetly at his sinister, jagged presence. Thinking she could fix it.

Insanity is just repeating the same actions and expecting different results.

He bites down on the impulse her mournful eyes inspire.

“You maybe can find a way to be honest with yourself,” she shrugs, like it’s no big deal to face every demon he’s running from. 

Why did he agree to this trip? What out there was punishing him that the one time he tried to be a good son to his living parent  _ she _ shows up?

“I am honest with myself. I already knew Han Solo was never coming back. He’s dead.”

What stage of grief is being a complete dick?

 

* * *

 

It’s been a long hike, his feet are aching, but the spot their guide pushed Poe for three more miles of hiking for is in fact breathtaking. 

They all struggled to keep up with her, of course, but her enthusiasm, if not contagious, was inspirational. 

An extra loop through the hills, higher ground, and they can see everything in the bay. Finn’s piggybacking Rose, the now-present Snap and Poe and Kaydel are arguing for who’d survive the longest if a 1980’s slasher villain crept upon their camp tonight, and Rey is…

Rey is quietly beside him. 

She must feel bad for him. Must have always felt bad for him. That was this special attention shit. He’s old enough to not need his dad to help set up his tent, but she’s misplacing her own parental issues on him because he’s got a fresher wound.

“I had this counselor,” she laughs softly, and the smile she has just with herself lingers for a moment before she continues,  _ “Cassian. _ I had the biggest crush on him. My swimming instructor. He barely tolerated me. One summer, I got my first big camp boyfriend, which meant we sat together during free time and communicated almost exclusively through people in our cabins acting as intermediaries. Of course my heart belonged to Cassian, but I had to be realistic, you know? Date someone my own age. And then he dumps me at the mid-session dance. For another girl in my cabin. Absolutely crushes me.

“So I’m crying alone in the woods, mad at everyone who let me get my stupid hopes up, and Cassian is walking back from the staff cabin. He’s absolutely horrified, like some jailbait fourteen-year-old is going to try to seduce him and cause some kind of legal clusterfuck, but then he sees I am  _ sobbing. _ So he’s internally warring with a possible lawsuit over my obvious lust for him, and my pathetic teen girl feelings, so he like, awkwardly,  _ barely touching me,” _

She tense-handed pats Ben’s arm once to exemplify, a flash of motion more than a touch, like swatting a fly with no strength.  _ “Pats _ my shoulder, and he says ‘You’re a catch. Fuck him.’ and then  _ sprints _ away from me into the woods.”

Rey laughs to herself. Ben doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to leave her story yet. Her nice memory in the woods. 

He can’t tell her a fucking thing about being Han Solo’s real son. The good in her doesn’t deserve it.

He likes her as a trail guide. That college tour through the wilderness. Pointing out Grand Hound’s Tongues by name, spouting facts about local fauna. Old legends of the mountains. Keeping it impersonal. 

His  _ personal _ guide; that was another thing entirely. He didn’t like her that way. It was too invasive. Like her guidance on the trail, it was hard because she was good at it. Keeping up was a struggle.

“I kept that memory running through my head  _ forever. _ I may have drafted wedding vows for us with that story. Comparing every boy to him. Thinking about it in algebra class. Lying awake at night. _ ‘I’m a catch’.” _

“You are,” he finds himself murmuring. 

“I annoy you,” she deflects, and it makes him tense up, because he never says anything because he  _ has _ to. He meant it.

“But you are. Take it from the least involved person here.”

“Stop,” she whispers finally, beckoning him to a break in the trees. Reluctantly, entranced by her awe, he goes to her side. The mist clouds everything in a textured, soft glow.

It’s really striking. The view of the ocean. A lot of gray, but layered gray, harsh and soft and still and chaotic. 

They seem to know to wait until the others are gone enough to leave them in complete silence. And they stay like that for a long time. Watching the landscape move.

It’s like meditating. He can feel their breathing sync. He feels...calmer. Like he needed this refresher. Like she knew what he needed. 

“How do you deal with anger?” she asks quietly. 

She’s looking at him. He swallows. If she knew Han for a few years, she probably knows more about him than even he previously thought she did.

But she’s genuinely curious, like there’s something wrong with her, not him.

“I don’t very well,” he admits. But doesn't tell her more.

She leans back against a tree trunk, arms crossed.

“You choke down-” she shakes her head. “You’ve been  _ tolerating _ me all afternoon, and I’ve been rubbing you the wrong way since I got in the car.”

“So you’ve noticed,” he murmurs, but tries to mirror the _ it’s not you it’s me _ tone.

He must have failed at it, because she looks down at the ground.

“But I think it’s kind, that you do,” she still looks hurt, “I’m sort of a case, here. Foster-kid damage. I appreciate you listening to me vent.”

He hadn’t thought anything he’d done had any value to her. He nods slowly, fists in his jacket pockets. She’s pulled her flannel back on, tied at her waist over her high-cut black jeans; those that are ripped perfectly at her knees, like she didn’t buy them that way. Hair up however the twist of the tie will hold it, forever haphazard. 

Unpretentious. Comfortable. Unlike the girls he usually looked twice at.

Like she needs him. Neurotic. Messy. Just trying to pass through life unnoticed.

There was something mournful to her tone. Like she told the story for a different reason.

"I like listening to you."

"I'd like to do the same, because it means a lot to me."

He scrambles to dodge the prompt.

“What happened with Cassian? You guys engaged yet?”

She clears her throat to hide it, but she’s crying because he asked. Immediately. Like she’s already been thinking it, and he pushed her over. 

“He was there a few more summers. He was my lifeguarding trainer, which is funny because he taught me to swim. Once the teen-thirst phase died, he was able to actually feel comfortable around me and we were became pretty close. He married another counselor from the camp who I loved, they invited me to the wedding but I couldn’t get out of state at that age. It felt like a family, for a while, even when I aged out of camp and couldn’t go back. But he died,” she takes a pained breath, soldiering on. “It was a rough time. You try to seal off the love you had to the time when it felt good. You don’t want to carry it out of the past to where it can hurt you.”

Makes perfect sense to him. 

It wasn’t romantic love, or parental love; but formative love. The person who believed in you, who made you what you were. There’s an implication, a slight one, that Han was this person to her too. To Finn, to Poe, to the web of people who made her who she was. Intertwined. Taking one out of the equation was such a precarious emotional jenga-pile. 

He hesitates, having clearly fucked up everything he’s said to her all day. With profound fear, he cups the back of her neck and kisses the top of her head, right across the sweep of hair pulled back into a half-bun.

“You’re a catch,” he tries out carefully against her skull, and she begins to cry harder. But it’s not the reaction he feared, when her arms band around his waist and she presses her brow to his collarbone.

_ “You’re a catch,” _ he repeats fiercely, smelling the pine and sugar and  _ Rey _ on her, and it surges in his chest that he’s holding another person who needs it. He’s never held someone because they needed to be held. This messed up, brilliant, effortless girl who makes him feel so sloppy and underdeveloped. Who has a better use for her heart than he ever did his. 

He thinks, vaguely, if she deserves it so much, it’s in a better place if he gives it to her. 

“What’s by your foot?” he murmurs into her hair, because there is a white flower the spills downward like icicles that he’s only just noticed. It’s got thick white stems, and the blooms flop over, looking like an ice flow from a white cloud.

She wiggles away enough to identify it. 

“Ghost Plant,” she murmurs against his chest, which she had to knowingly return to at some point, he realizes. But her face back there willingly, after contemplating being away from it.  “Also called Indian Pipe. Monotropa Uniflora. Or...Corpse Plant.”

“Hot,” he touches her hip gently. She shuffs out a laugh.

“It doesn’t contain chlorophyll. It’s a parasitic plant. It...leeches energy off of chlorophyllic trees. They can survive in the dark, under the trees in these woods, even deprived on sunlight because of them.”

He sort of sways with his arms around her, soothing, because her tears are making him want to melt her into his skin.

“This is... _not_ a pat on the shoulder,” she murmurs against his chest. Realizing the position they're in. It makes his blood go hot, but she’s looking at him with ironic amusement through her tears. “Is this what you’d do with someone who  _ wasn’t _ a teen who was crying in the woods?”

“I’d…” 

He hesitates. This is a bad time to answer that honestly. Feeling too powerful from her taking comfort from him. It made him feel capable. But too lusty. Shamefully wanting to treat her like a very legal sobbing woman up against a pine.

She’s got tears coating her cheeks.

He’s a monster. 

“I wouldn’t know what else to do,” he says dumbly, realizing he’s gotten a crying woman up against a tree, and half an erection. He staggers back. “Sorry.”

He stumbles back to the trail. Leaving her with all of it. This whole amazing, painful, fucked-up world. 

 

* * *

 

 

He burns two marshmallows and gives up. 

He  _ likes _ fire, it’s a drug, so when someone asks him to dangle flammable, oozy sugar into the flames-

Torches it every time. 

Used to drive Leia nuts. 

Poe’s licking melty sugar off his fingers from a seat next to him. He’s not sure how that happened. Even as his groomsman, they keep their distance. He takes a deep breath through his nose, and clearly he’s trained everyone in his life to stop talking when he does this. 

“What were you guys like together as kids,” Rey practically reads his mind, leveraging the question at Poe, playing dirty. “I can’t really picture it.”

“We both went through our airplane obsessed phase at the same time. That made for hours over at each other’s houses, toy planes, pretending to be the Red Baron, that whole thing.”

Ben sinks back in his seat. That is maybe the most tasteful take on their relationship to each other one could come up with. Dragging a happy memory from such a dead part of the past. But Poe isn’t bullshitting. There’s affection there, and Ben can’t find anything bad about those memories he’s pushed down.

“Cute,” Finn says with a smile, “co-pilots.”

“Yeah,” Poe doesn’t fight it. “It was always sort of forced proximity with our parents, but that was our thing. You put two boys together and they will mostly likely get along, but we were obsessed. It was like, ‘I got a new plane, I want to show Ben’ kind of thing. So it was kind of natural to invite Ben into the wedding party. It’s so interconnected, our parents, my childhood. He’s my oldest friend.”

Ben stays quiet. He knows this is some kind of test, where he’s meant to prove something. 

But he doesn't. And maybe because of that, he fails.

“Your mom told me this story once,” Poe’s tone is dangerously pleased with himself. Ben’s stomach drops. This is never good. “About Ben and a bear.”

There’s a flutter of interest. Kaydel even looks up from her phone.

This is not the worst story, but Rey’s smile is so gentle and excited he’s actually ready to take the telling of it out of Poe’s hands if it does not adequately satisfy her. He takes a swig of expensive vodka. Rey nurses her beer to her lips at the same time. They make eye contact over their bottles. 

“Tell me about the bear. And Ben,” Rey murmurs, eyes full of firelight, and he wants to fuck her into the dirt. 

She has only gone to him for emotional vulnerability, his biggest turn-off, yet her weepy eyes do something to his dick that he can’t describe. Which is why to remain in control of himself, he has to stay ten feet away from her at all times. 

Poe chews thoughtfully, then perceives the group around him quiet enough to continue. Ben doesn’t like all the eyes moving back and forth from Poe to him, but Rey’s eyes are locked on him. Only pair of eyes he cares about.

“He was walking back to the car for a comic book and this huge black bear corners him alone on the trail. His parents are watching in horror. Leia thought it was going to eat him. The whole campsite is Han and Leia in a flurry, tearing everything apart, looking for bear spray and tin cans to beat together to scare it off. They’re yelling at each other to try and save their son. Thinking it’s the big dramatic rescue. And he just hits the thing on the nose with a flashlight. It runs off. Done.”

“What the fuck,” Finn murmurs. 

Kaydel’s mouth is hanging open.

“You do not get to just do that and live.”

"It was one of those metal flashlights," he shrugs. 

“What was going through your head?”

“If I did nothing, and it killed me, it wouldn’t have looked any better than fighting it and it killing me would.”

“Ben  _ fought a bear,” _ Finn clasps a hand over Rey’s knee and shakes it, his voice getting higher pitched. 

“And lived to tell the tale,” she smirks, examining him closely. He tries not to flinch as her eyes drag over him. 

She lifts her marshmallow from the fire, carefully toasting from a distance that only someone who has profound patience and a sophisticated taste for s’mores would be able to keep it without getting bored and just burning the damn thing. She neatly folds it between two graham crackers, with chocolate she arranged in an overlapping triangle to distribute a good ratio. Catalogue worthy, the perfect proportion of crumbly and melted. 

And she leans forward and slides it into Ben’s hand. A reward. 

He hasn’t had a s’more since childhood, but he eats the thing dutifully staring at her. It's perfect. 

She has the phantom of a smile. Even after the disaster of this afternoon, and rebuffing every attempt she made to connect with him. 

Even knowing the kind of son he was. From his  _ father’s _ side of the story.

“You gonna share that vodka?”

Her voice is thick, hinting. 

This is dangerous. 

Her hand covers his when he hands her the bottle by the slim neck. Tugging. Guiding him to stand. 

“I want to go for a walk,” she mumbles to Finn, who seems to know to cover for her and prompts Snap into an embarrassing story about Poe before anyone notices their need for privacy.

She tugs gently on his hands until he follows from the fire. She leads him to the darkness of the beach.

This is very dangerous.

He goes along anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

Ben still isn’t used to her abrupt tone, but he is hardly the king of social discretion. The paper-bag-wrapped bottled is placed graciously in her hand. She cradles it with just as much care.

She knocks his shoulder with hers anyway, like he’s done something wrong, and his feet dig in the sand, stopping while she walks on with a contented sip.

“You would bring the good shit to a  _ bonfire.” _

She doesn’t let up her pace away from their group, somewhere in the distance dancing and laughing around the flames, as she tosses the loaded statement casually back at him. He stuffs his hands in his pockets-

_ repulsed or impressed; he still can’t quite place her tone _

-and follows, a moth to her flame, as she leads him to the water and down the length of the beach. Her boots crunch the wet rocks. If his boots get wet, he’ll feel every drop saturated into the leather. 

She smiles, the far-off-flames making her glow orange. It’s the only other source of light. There’s glimpses of dark green wool socks, her long legs in her jeans, the aviatrix jacket she’s slung over her shoulders. He wishes he knew how to feel, with her, but not knowing how to feel is the closest he’s come to feeling something in a long time.

“This is  _ smooth,” _ she gestures with the high neck of the vodka bottle in her fist. “This is not the usual camping-trip hooch, is what I’m saying. None of us even packed olives, or martini glasses…”

“My mistake,” he admits quickly, because he already feels like he shouldn’t even be here.

“No,” she takes a sip, spinning on her heel to face him fully. She walks backwards as she talks, like that tour guide, or the trail guide she actually is. “I’ve never actually done the  _ glamping _ thing; it’s kind of sexy. This vodka costs more than most of the shit in my pack.”

He remains paces behind her. 

“You’re prepared,” she adds, “nothing surprises you when you’re prepared, right Ben? That way it doesn’t hurt.”

He does not know why she pushes him. Or why he feels the need to push back.

“Scout’s motto,” he watches her hips move as she stalks him by reeling him in. “didn’t you learn that at your summer camp?”

“Survival isn’t about being prepared. Survival is getting it all swept away and starting from scratch.”

“Maybe next time,” he’s had his fair share of the vodka, “you can tell me what I’m doing wrong before we’re already on the trip.”

She covers her mouth with one hand, laughing. “You’re not doing anything wrong.”

“Feels like it.”

She stumbles for a moment on some slick rocks. He catches her forearm, gripping it to feel her own arm muscles work against him as she rights her stance. She works well against him, just as soon shifting her grip to his forearm and pulling him along into the dark.

“There’s going to be a next time?” she replies with an easy smile, and it’s  _ that,  _ it’s that shit, where he doesn’t know if she’s deflecting or mocking him or least likely of all maybe  _ flirting- _

He takes the vodka out of her hand, tilting the long, clear bottle to his lips. They now have to arch their necks way back to get anything to come out of it. But Poe put a decent dent in it.

“You’re…more suited to this than I am.”

She shakes her head. “It’s a nurture thing to be a survivalist, not a gene. Be happy about that. Trust me.”

“Well you make me feel…”

_ Uncomfortable. Anxious. Unworthy.  _

And yet  _ happy, _ when she does cast a half-hearted smile up at him, clapping him on the back after he sets up his tent completely without her help. Falls into step with him to look out over the cliffs on an afternoon hike, both breathless and silent while they watch the waves of the Pacific. Points out fauna to him with rote, memorized spiels on their native presence in this specific park and the best times to see them, she’s so easy to listen to even if he has no idea what she’s talking about. Laughs when he burns a marshmallow, torches it, and tosses the burning thing into the sand with a grimace. 

Slides him a perfect,  _ golden-brown, toasted but not burnt _ s’more and asks if he has any more vodka, taking it for the road so they can take a walk. The stars are really gorgeous off this cove, like she said. 

Of course,  _ she’s _ gorgeous. That doesn’t help him know what to say around her. So he just exists awkwardly but adjacently.

And her eyes when she’s sad, he wants to peel her apart and nestle in every inch of her raw nerves. He has never, ever fantasized about the wet tears falling from a woman’s eyes, but her pain awakens something primal in him. To hold her, but also have her.

“I want to go on a camping trip planned by you,” she pulls a knitted hat out of her pocket, stuffing her head into it and tucking her hair to fall neatly over her shoulders, “A Ben Solo Camping Trip with expensive vodka and state-of-the-art, untouched equipment and quiet contemplation instead of when we should be drinking and getting wild-”

There’s a pause after Rose  _ screams _ from over by the fire, they both confirm a happy kind of scream because Poe is starting to undress for Finn, who watches while stretched out in a lawn chair. Kaydel dutifully films on her phone.

“I’m sorry I can’t measure up,” he looks at the shadows dancing on the sand, “I’m just here as a family obligation. I’ve been dreading this, actually.”

Rey is quiet for a minute, the smile leaving her face.

That look. That look invites him inside. He wants to dive headfirst. 

So fucking dangerous.

“Alright,” she kicks a rock so it  _ plops _ into the water. “Shit, Ben, I’m sorry. I’ve always been…coarse. I tend to play chicken until someone swerves. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’ll stop hitting on you. We can just go back to the others.”

He chokes on the sip of vodka he was taking. 

“What?”

“When you showed up and and were actually like earnest and brooding and hot, with a wicked instinctual taste for outdoor skills, I didn’t know what to do. I just…I tend to mess with things, especially when I feel like I don’t deserve them.”

She twists easily off their path along the water, up on higher ground, retreating. Walking back to neutral territory. 

“No, wait. I just didn’t know you were flirting.”

“S’fine,” she mutters, much less careful with her words than she was before. Maybe vodka kicking in.

“I didn’t want to  _ believe _ you were flirting with me-”

He bends down, slides his arms around her waist. He’s not the chasing kind, but a firm hold does the trick. She stops walking away. 

She’s not moving or breathing.

“I was too scared to think that, because if I was wrong, it would make me so fucking miserable because I didn’t know what to do when I met you too.”

He squeezes around her middle. He was so distant with her before, now he can’t imagine letting her go. 

She smells like campfire, which has never been a sexy smell until her. Smoky. A little bit of pine.

She just lets him talk. Because she’s been waiting for him to tell her anything about himself all day.

“I’m a fucking  _ mess, _ and I don’t know what to do with the things I don’t deserve either.”

She stands up on her toes, taking the vodka out of his hands. She takes a sip, for courage. For luck.

“You didn’t mess anything up,” her smile, usually confident, is shy. There’s barely any firelight touching her, yet she glows. There’s no sound but the gentle lap of the waves. “I like being around you.”

He just stares at her, stunned. Nothing in life has ever been this easy. Too easy, he’s going to fuck it up-

But she smiles like the girl he couldn’t decode, confident and adventurous and brave.

“That tent sure looks good from the outside…” 

Her arms close around his neck. The air is dark and crisp, but they’re both flushed from the alcohol. Her face is very close to his, looking up, fluttering her lids over her soft eyes. “…I’d like to see the inside up close.”


	2. Chapter 2

There is a moment when Ben dreads having to explain _-yeah Poe I am hooking up with a member of your wedding party right now-_ but a look passes around the fire when Rey leads him back to his own damn tent:

It spares him having to; but was somehow _worse_ than the truth.

He always had a hair trigger temper. Worsened by...the events of the last year.

Of the group currently surrounding with him, Finn was _maybe_ the only one who didn’t change how he acted around Ben. Which Ben appreciated; arguments at Thanksgiving are actually kind of soothing because of everyone else chewing dry mouthfuls of Turkey and pointedly _not engaging._  

Poe was more welcoming since Han's passing, but coldly welcoming, his eyes judging. Like the family obligation was _for the good of everyone_ and not because Ben had flagrantly abandoned his duties as Han and Leia's real son and Poe was stepping in.

Ben wasn’t a good son. So Poe was obligated; as though he made some deathbed promise to Han to keep something held together with the most tenuous of glues

Not that Ben knew anything about Han’s deathbed promises.

It's like they think Rey was there to talk about his dad, too. They all look hopeful. Like his privacy with her is a breakthrough. He can picture the morning; the question that is literally always a whisper-sigh when two people are holding coffee; _how is he?_

The most grating sound in the world to him, because he's never asked this, but he's always involved. He's the _he?_ whispered as though it's protecting him from shame. It's the ultimate emasculation, being whispered about over coffee because talking about it apparently won't work.

He tries to avoid their gaze; nervous and sympathetic.

He’s honestly offended how blatantly no one even thinks he’s actually getting laid.

Rey threads her fingers in his. Not meeting any of the fervent, questioning looks sent her way.

Finally, that tent unzips, somehow the sexiest thing he will unzip tonight, and they shiver together, opening his sleeping bag to cushion the floor and fit them both.

He turns on the battery-powered lamp he bought for the trip. He’s typically a sex-in-the-dark kind of guy; but not with Rey. Even he, a man of peculiar habits, knows not to waste this opportunity.

Rey does, endearing herself to him eternally, examine the tent closely from the inside. Touches design features, clever storage pockets, stares at the engineering of the tent roof with her head tilted back in awe like it’s the fucking Sistine Chapel.

Nothing ever stops her from being completely herself; his attitude, her sadness, a burning sense of lust that he is trying to superimpose on his face so she gets the hint and stops wasting time marveling at cupholders. 

She settles beside him, both of them hunched so not to hit a tent pole and too obviously jolt things around. He bought it knowing it was big enough to two people; but he’s big for one person, so it is hard to not touch.

They’re silent for a moment.

And she turns the same time he turns and for once they meet in the exact middle.

Then touch comes immediately.

He wraps her ponytail around his fist and uses that grip to tilt her chin up. Her hands come softly around his neck. He groans, kissing her, a little pissed about the looks he got from the fire.

She feels this, murmuring into his lips;

“I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. Tries to focus on her instead. Does something else with his body and mind and hopes that the vibrating anger will stop resonating inside of him like a percussive sound wave that just needs to travel far enough that it can’t be heard anymore.

His tongue fills her mouth, and she’s snake-like in his arms with how much the warmth makes her go soft. Letting him in. Letting him slide in, kissing her dirty, and holding him close.

She’s just an open person. He can wring emotions out of her so easily. He doesn’t have to _make_ her feel anything, can’t manipulate anything that isn’t there. But she shares what is. He can honestly, for how awkward her feels around her, list her virtues for a while. Nothing about their disjointed connection reflects badly on her, if anything he's kicking himself for every time he snapped at her, any tense pauses, the stupid shit he's said.

He is doing better for himself than he has maybe ever done, which is a little overwhelming.

Maybe that’s why everyone thinks they’re in here to just have a good cry, pass around the feelings stick and sing "Kumbaya".

Because no one else totally got off on her College-Tour-Guide/Guidance Counselor schtick like he did.

Her mouth fills itself with a bite from the skin of his shoulder. He’s sliding his freezing hands all over her thighs. Easy as that.

“Is this how you remembered getting into bed at camp? Did Cassian do bed checks?”

“At camp,” she gasps as he shamelessly, intentionally, holds her legs open and thumbs the seam of her jeans into her groin, a much needed friction. “Cassian was never in a girls' cabin, it was against the rules. I'd always want to sneak across the lake to Boys' Camp to see him. He was probably right to think I was a liability."

He laughs at her embarrassed tone.

"I think what you were feeling was maybe the most natural part of a summer camp experience."

She closes her eyes, ruminating on his question as he strokes over her jeans with his full hand.

"B-bedtime was different. We would hear ‘Taps’ play before we went to sleep every night.”

He rolls on top of her.

Fucking morbid, but adorable. He feels a little more secure when she drops shit like that onto the table. Secure in his degree of fucked-up, if not dealing with it as well as she is.

“Before that did they sacrifice one camper to the Wicker Man?”

She shivers when a thumb digs insistently where he knows her entrance would be. Rubbing back and forth, making her legs shake as she tries to strip, topless quickly, but still in boots and jeans beneath. The slide of the sleeping bag doesn’t help them move the way they need to. Too slippery. There is a constant rustle from that material getting rubbed against. It feels good against his skin.

She pulls him over her body, lying back.

“There’s lyrics,” she holds him close, too cold to focus on fucking. Her nipples press into his chest, but the focus is on warmth before pleasure. Once warmth is achieved, they writhe against each other, remembering pleasure. “We’d sing them at closing campfire. I’d be sobbing at this point. Inconsolable. Snot all over my face.”

“Sexy,” he kisses her neck, content to let her keep talking. Wild shit happens to him when she talks; he won’t ever discourage it.

“I never wanted to leave.”

He strokes her hair out of her face. “I’m sorry.”

This time she is pressed up against him when she vents, and it is the same powerful feeling, more so now when he can touch her, make her feel good from his own hands soothing. He holds a thigh tight around his hip, lips pressed to her cheek, and she digs her fingers into his back.

“That bus would come along the next morning and take me back to my old life.”

“And that day, you’d be waiting for someone else.”

She shrugs, but her eyes are sad. Watery.

Ben clings closer. He just wants more of her, it may destroy him, but he can’t help dig in when she’s vulnerable and pry more out. “How does the song go?”

 _“Day is done,”_ she murmur-sings, her chest rumbling.

_“Gone the sun_

_From the lakes_

_From the hills_

_From the sky_

_All is well_

_Safely rest_

_God is nigh”_

Her voice shakes when her song ends: how can he currently be in bed with a girl who sings military funeral songs at him?

And currently _loving_ it.

_“Who the fuck died?”_

They both freeze at Finn’s sleepy voice drifting from a neighboring tent. Poe mutters something. Sounds hushed and angry.

 _“Go to sleep,”_ Rey screams back, and Finn groans in the distance.

There’s a moment of awkward silence. He traces Rey’s features in the lamplight with his eyes.

She leans up, tries to kiss him, but Finn’s choice of words hit him at the wrong moment.

Not exactly Finn’s words; but Poe’s reaction. In the moment it seemed as though Poe was just trying to sleep and was annoyed with all of them them. But what Finn said…

Poe was telling Finn to shut up.

He almost wants to scream back into the night  _“my fucking dad.”_ in some bitter, eternal echo, and he can tell Rey knows this.

He wants to scream that out a lot. At work when his boss talks down to him. When baristas are needlessly rude. When he gets a parking ticket. His dad is dead and he has no idea what he's permitted to feel because he was a shit son. Like the universe will fucking _lay off_ when it knows this about him.

Rey’s question from earlier is adept in a lot of ways: the anger is getting harder to manage.

The pain. He’s swallowing a lot of grief: the whole length of the sword that it is, and the skill is hard to master. He feels it bleeding up his throat, filling his mouth with the taste on a daily basis.

And he has no idea what to do about it.

He doesn’t have the right to grieve. Especially around Rey, who was probably more present during the last days than he was. Surrounded by more deserving people to feel bad about his father.

People who were definitely at the funeral. Who would know that he wasn’t.

That would put quite a target on his back for someone who cared about his father.

It would have been one thing if Han Solo had died quickly when they were out of contact. An accident.

His death felt like it shouldn’t have happened; but Han Solo did not die quickly. And his son knew that, watching it like a car crash in slow motion. Everyone on this trip knew that Ben knew that and did nothing.

He flattens his hand on Rey’s sternum, trapping her to the sleeping bag. She’s breathing heavily. Staring at him. Her eyes are so big.

He’s breathing hard too, that piney, cold air that just universally feels like camping. Hovered away from her body, the night is chilly, and fog puffs out of his mouth.

“He didn’t mean…” she licks her lips. Nudges him closer with her legs around his waist. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I really don’t.”

His hair falls over his face when he bends to kiss her neck. Distracting himself. She sighs, and there’s tension between them, that same awkwardness born anew where they each pull in different directions.

She lets go first.

“Okay,” she sighs again as his lips work over her neck, different this time. She pushes his stomach away from her groin so she can unbutton her jeans. She pauses for a second, annoyance wrinkling her face adorably, when she remembers she has to kick her boots off first. That takes a few seconds of struggle.

He touches her face when she stills beneath him, jeans successfully shed.

“You miss him.”

She nods, her throat tense. She’s trying to curb this reaction. Trying to make this easy on him.

For once, he doesn’t want that. Doesn’t want her to hold back so he won’t have to get involved. Even if it means cock-blocking himself. There’s a kernel of a good in him, maybe this is the weekend to pretend anything can come out of it.

“You can say.”

He holds her down. Ben can handle morbid. What he can’t handle is sentimental, but he can handle morbid. He searches her face. Maybe for a deciding factor on this, the glimmers she’s given him with her death-obsessed attempts to flirt…

That maybe she’s as fucked up as him.

“Of course I do,” she says quietly. “I met him during a strange time in my life. I’d aged out of the system; Finn and I had just gotten our first place together. Living in the shittiest apartment you’ve ever seen, but it was what we could afford. Then Finn was dating Poe, and I met Leia through Poe, and then I met Han. He and I always got along. He taught me to drive.”

Ben lets out a quiet, ironic breath of a laugh. “I mean, me too.”

She closes her eyes. “Yeah, sorry.”

“I’m letting you get away with saying a lot of shit-”

“I know,” she laughs softly, “I know you’re letting me. I bet you break a lot of hearts when women say half the shit I say to you. It’s why I keep going, because your face is so sweet when I-”

There’s an awkward smile, like she was being silly for telling him this, waving it off-

“You don’t have to smile so I feel like you’re going to be okay.”

She goes still underneath him. Staring up with dangerous suspicion.

“Not for my benefit,” he shrugs. 

They lie like that for a moment, moths flickering shadows around the light illuminating them. He’s still hovered over her, hands on either side of her head. He wonders who thinks he will pounce first. She’s tense like she believes it will be sooner. He is trying to hold on for later.

She swallows, trying to be casual.

“It’s no use in fixating. Just let it out and move on.”

“Hmm,” he strokes a hand down her bare belly, then he shrugs off his shirt. “Guess I’ll just fuck you, then.”

His lips mouth at her earlobe, and she shrugs one shoulder up, surprised at the tickling feeling.

“Okay?” he adds.

“Okay,” she murmurs, and he coaxes her hips to his, dragging her down the silky material of the sleeping bag to press flush against him.

“I think you have more to say,” he says softly into a kiss, when she’s gasping underneath him. The friction of his erection rubbing against her has her eyes knitted shut. “I think it’s hiding inside you. Want me to get it out?”

“Mhmm,” she whimpers, high pitched. He had a feeling. Fucked up just like him.

_“Are you hurting, Rey?”_

Her thighs shake around his hips, and she arches up to try and join them. The croon seems enough to undo her. He holds her open by one knee, not allowing her to feel the relief yet.

Oh, if it were that easy. To fix her this way. To make it better. But every wave of her pain hits him in an instinctual place where he needs to do whatever he can. Blinded by this. He can’t not do anything about it. So he has to put his hands on her.

“I want to focus on _this,”_ she pleads quietly. For no demons.

"Whatever you want."

He thrusts, hard, and her spine curls back. A cry chokes in her throat. He’s wound her up, maybe too much than what was fair, but exactly as much as he needed to take.

She’s so lush and wet, more ready for him than he could have believed. They’re a tight fit, but she’s clenching around him and the first glide is so yielding.

He waits until he has her nails digging into his back to keep going. “You can be honest with me.”

She clings to his shoulders and takes every punishing thrust. “Same,” she keens softly. “Oh, Ben, please, same.”

She’s trying to make him open up; but he’s really, really not ready for this tonight.

There’s a softness in her eyes for a second. She strokes his brow.

“Sometimes, you make the same bewildered expression. It’s weird recognizing him in your face.”

This day has just been a series of things that should have him hitchhiking on the side of the road just to get away from her. But he digs his heels in the dirt instead. Burrows down.

His thrusts are mean, the only revenge taken for a lot of prodding. She seems to like that. Accepting it. Maybe even had wanted him to get like this.

"Told you I'd get it out of you."

She chokes on that, head falling back when he angles a thrust against a spot that made her hips grind against him. Works like a charm. He presses the palm of his hand to her mouth to cover the keening cry that shoots out of her as she bears down on his cock. Her cunt is like a vice, he grinds his hips into her to his own completion not too long afterwards.

It’s too good. It’s been a while. He hasn’t felt this normal in a long time.

She pulls him down, resting alongside her on the sleeping bag. She shoots him an accusing look.

“Usually, groomsmen wait until the reception to pick up someone in the wedding party,” she laughs softly against his chest, then her body moves in this _slide_ to caress whatever skin is touching with a slow, subtle stroke. It makes him shiver.

He pulls her naked body snug up against his, zipping them up into the warm sleeping bag. He keeps his response coy.

“So, as Finn's Best Man; what stopped you from waiting?”

 

* * *

 

She’s there when he wakes up, which shouldn’t surprise him, but it’s like waking up on Christmas morning. She’s resting her head on his shoulder. Strumming her fingers along his abdomen, barely awake when the glow from outside lightens up the tent interior.

“Mmm,” he pretends to be more asleep than he really is, probably to hide the massive erection he’s sporting for her. _“Rey?”_

There’s a shudder of a chuckle. “Yeah?”

He shifts onto his back, like he’s in shock. Like she wasn’t there last night at all. It startles her, but there’s moment of eye contact where he seems to be communicating to her the way she did to him.

_Go with it. Please._

“Rey,” he clears the sleep his throat “you should really be in your cabin.”

There’s a look in her eyes;

_This is fucked up._

And in his;

_You compared my face to my dead dad’s last night._

She clears her throat, snuggling closer.

“I had to sneak through Boy’s Camp to see you,” she whines, drawing her naked body close to his in the sleeping bag.

“Rey,” he sighs, the put-upon crush. Runs his fingers through his hair with a tired hand. She watches this. Enjoying the view. “It was really dangerous of you to come here. For both of us.”

There’s an exchange of ironic smiles. Joint tastelessness seems to be a flavor they both enjoy.

“Make it worth my while.”

He then gathers her up gently. “We could get in so much trouble. We shouldn’t.”

Opposite actions and empty words. He’s rubbing her cock against her entrance, still slick from the night before. He had wiped her off with a tee-shirt before they fell asleep, but she couldn’t be _this wet-_

“Ahh,” she hisses, arching into him. Maybe she was, just since she woke up. For him. He finds this amazing. “I wanted to see you. Wake up next to you.”

“Why, Rey?”

He doesn't find this scenario particularly hot when it excludes _legal_ Rey; but she's next to him, and he can read it on her face. It's doing a lot for her. After that missed opportunity in the woods; he'll embody whatever the fuck she wants.

“Because I…” she clings to him, on some other wavelength. It’s like trying to talk about a book he’s read once with someone who’s read it a thousand times. He is the new voyager into a well-trodden fantasy for her.

And she’s just fucked up enough to let him in anyway.

“I just want it so much.”

She seems to press against him to silence the talking part, like words or over-explaining will only make this turn sour. _Why_ they shouldn't be doing this doesn't matter between Ben and Rey. There's always the stupid "both in the wedding party" excuse that neither of them seem to care about. What's important is to pretend they shouldn't, but she’s already _there,_ she’s in her sweet spot, so he pulls her over him. He's not a good actor. Getting this far is fine.

“Well, since you came all this way, I’d better stuff you full.” he guides her hips to sheath himself inside. She whimpers at the stretch as she sinks down, her legs and body not quite awake enough to make the entrance easier to bear. Her weight drives her down. He’s deeper this way, than he was last night, and he gently strokes her belly, feeling himself nudging inside through the tight muscle of her abdomen.

She shudders over him, whimpering sadly, until he digs his fingers into her hips and grinds her down with him inside.

“This what you would think about?”

“Hmm,” she shrugs. “Cassian was already married to a man by the time I was able to craft anything this dirty.”

Ben raises an eyebrow, sitting up to rock his hips against her. “You have a track record-”

“Yeah, Finn, Cassian. I know. Why, do you have something to tell me too?”

He laughs, “You have nothing to worry about.”

She touches the ends of his hair, twisting them around her fingers.

“But it never felt like this,” she confesses in a whisper.

He strokes his fingers over her lower back.

“Even in your imagination?”

She has goosebumps on her arms, sitting above him. The cold is bracing, but makes their connection feel hotter, limbs shivering to try to pull themselves into the orbit of the place where they’re joined.

“No,” she shakes her head, riding him thoughtfully. Her hands guide her slow movements while braced against his chest. Her loose hair spills over her shoulders, there’s enough light to watch her do this and have that be enough. He doesn’t know how this got paced out so casually already: to have her bucking over him like they’re old pros at morning sex with each other. Especially in a tent. “I mean, I was a teenager, so the fantasy was he’d see...that I was special. Like, half of them were spent over-justifying an age difference and a power imbalance, or him completely lacking the self-control that made me respect him in the first place and just going for it, so…”

He touches her face, laughing as he looks at her snuggle into his hand. His thumb swipes over her cheek.

“Figured explicitly addressing that during foreplay would just drop us into endless over-justifying a fuck fantasy between strangers.”

She laughs, pressing the sound into the skin of his neck. He feels her shoulders move with it, shaking, and not just a polite exhale.

“I love doing mental gymnastics to justify not kink-shaming a hypothetical sex scenario.”

“A lot of big words for a woman who’s got a dick so deep in her.” He arches himself to grind up roughly, with his size, a little participation goes a long way. Her thighs tremble, fingers tightening on his arms. She looks a little lost, when he takes it, pleading for him to keep going.

“Ben,” she moans quietly, “you feel so nice.”

How does that make him feel more raw than anything he’s heard in decades? He snaps his hips into her, grabbing onto her ass to move her roughly over him. She tremors, gripping him desperately, an orgasm pulled as easily as him taking control in a moment of vulnerability. She sighs into his hair, hiding her face.

Her breathing is unsteady as he moves her along through it, planning on chasing behind quickly, but there’s an odd feeling that crosses him at the arhythmic sound.

He tries to remove her from his shoulder. She clings.

“Rey?”

She shakes her head. “I’m fine.”

She does not sound fine.

“Jesus.” He sits up and goes to lift her off of him. Searching her eyes. It’s not a long investigation; she’s crying. He freezes. “Are you okay?”

She’s trembling, crying a little harder.

“Did I do something wrong?”

Tears slip hot and fast down her cheeks. She covers her face, but he's already seen enough.

He nearly yelps in response, but she’s shaking her head, hiding them as they fall to the best of her ability.

“Sorry. This must be your nightmare. I don’t know what came over me. Give me a second.”

She seems anxious that _he’s_ disturbed. He’s not.

He may be more aroused than he’s been in his life. Which should disturb him.

But he just wants her.

He growls when she tries to lift herself off of him. Confused, she sinks back down, settled into his lap. She shivers at the look on his face.

“Just overwhelmed?” he tries, and she nods.

"There's apparently some feelings here I didn't know about," she adjusts her seat on his cock, which makes his vision white out for a second. Fluttering a hand between them. "So, uh, sorry. Dealing with this weird repressed sexual fantasy here."

She doesn’t want to detach from him, in fact, her cunt is gripping down as though she wants him to stay.

"For...Cassian?"

 _"Jesus,"_ she shuts her eyes. He's stunned; she really wasn't thinking about anyone but him. "No. Just...having what I want after wanting it for a long time and then forgetting that part of myself. Like, you remembered, and wanted to make it into something good. That's actually...really sweet."

She kisses his brow gently, and it is the kind of reward that has him want to kneel at her feet. He'll make anything good, if he can, for her. Paying taxes. Dental appointments. Trips to the DMV.

"And I kind of miss Cassian," she admits flatly, "But platonically. This is very complicated, and you're inside me, so talking about it _-ugh."_

She keeps herself pressed to him, breathing steadily. He can tell she's still crying.

“Can we,” his voice cracks. He’s trying really hard not to rub or brush against her to stimulate anything between them; he may die if he does, “can we keep going?”

“You don’t care?”

Her brows raise, but she doesn’t throw out a reaction that’s _too_ shocked. Pleasantly surprised. He shakes his head.

“Do you want me to?” he tries to keep his voice even, and that pitches it lower than he intended. How much he likes this must be fucking obvious; she’s going to find him crazy.

It's not lack of caring that makes him want to fuck her when she's like this. It is a primal form of concern; maybe how he can show it in the only way he knows.

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “It feels good. I don't know what that says about me.”

_If only you knew what I was thinking._

He moves quickly, pressing her onto her belly against the sleeping bag. She gives a soft sound of surprise when he pushes back into her from behind, hands fisted in the material beside her head.

“Fuck,” she groans, feeling the tension in the first snap of his hips.

He’s having a really hard time hiding how close he needs to be to her right now.

She peers over her shoulder at him, one eye looking back with her chin tucked near her collarbone. He laps at her wets cheek, trying to hide a moan that comes out of him that doesn’t sound human. It is not the eroticization of tears, it turns out, but that she feels comfortable enough to just keep going.

"You okay?" he asks again while slowing his pace. She whines. 

"Yeah...this headspace...is weirdly cathartic. Thanks."

"I have never been called 'cathartic' in bed, but from you, I'll take it."

He guides her to lift up on her knees a little bit, stroking her stomach and than delving a hand between her legs to caress her clit as he thrusts hard. She bites the material, trying not to cry out.

“Sweet girl,” he presses his lips to her shoulder. Close to her face, but actively avoiding her lips that seek his. “So patient with me.”

She struggles underneath him, clearly eager for another orgasm despite her horror over her reaction to the last one. He made her forget. That makes his chest flush with pride.

 _"You want to sing 'Taps' again?"_ he teases, and she shakes apart underneath him with a laugh instead of a sob.

He covers her mouth with one hand when he knows it’s coming; she screams into his palm and her whole body shudders with the reaction. He feels a twitch in her thighs that keeps going as he rides through it.

Tears fog those kind eyes again. He shuts his own, but the reaction has burned itself into his brain forever no matter how ashamed he is of it. He slams her hips into his and then rolls her against him as he cums, fingers digging into the flesh of her ass. She covers her mouth, trying to hide her sounds, and he barely smothers his enough to not have everyone awake and running out of their tents thinking a bear was attacking.

Rey pulls him down over her body, turning on her side so they spoon comfortably with him still inside her. He kisses wherever he can reach on her face. The tears are gone, but she's pensive, and he leaves her to that. Just touching her gently. 

Maybe he made something better, for once.


	3. Chapter 3

The spectacle of weddings is eternally lost on him. 

Not that he’s exactly a fixture on a lot of people’s guest lists, or has ever been included in a wedding party before…

But he’s seen movies. And it all seems way too much for him.

He wants to bow out. 

There are nights dedicated to pacing his apartment with his phone in his hand, ready to bow out.

He’s spent so much time dreading his mother being there; but now he’s slowly realizing with Poe mentioning things about the big day that  _ a whole lot _ of family friends will be there too; and he’s now part of the spectacle. 

Surrounded by people who are probably, rightfully, furious with him.

Not much is keeping him from abandoning ship, other than maybe the stubborn hope at some kind of pacification (redemption is impossible in their eyes, after what he did to his father) but he may be able to at least establish placation.

Still, he’s got his phone in his hand the week leading up to the wedding, ready to call Poe and announce some 24-hour bug. There’s not much keeping him from doing it.

There is always one thing keeping him from doing it. 

He does get to see Rey again.

 

* * *

 

 

The last time he saw Rey was packing up that camping trip. She had to go back with Snap and Jess, for some reason, taking a different car. He wanted to fake an engagement in the same place she was going if just for a few hours seated next to her, or in the damn trunk again.

They didn’t get that blessed time alone together after the first night. They put their clothes on, decided to keep things casual despite all the tears, and then Rey snuck back to her tent before anyone else woke up.

Then they were just friends. 

Friends.

It meant more than he thought that would.

She nudge him with those eyes and those prodding words throughout the weekend. Sometimes she hung back, way back, past her capability level to walk alongside him through the mountains in the group. She gave him a s’more or two after he burnt all of his. She teased him, as did everyone, about his childhood of fighting bears and they all drank together and by the last night he didn’t exactly feel he could  _ give _ anything to these people; but he felt like he had a safer spot in this place. One Rey reserved for him willingly. Without fail. He had a spot by her side, even if she wasn’t showering her favor over him. She liked him. It made him feel better than anything else could have in a long time.

Instead of his mother imposing a reservation for him amongst those who felt obligated. 

And the last morning as they got packed up Rey told him the way he was rolling up his sleeping bag was  _wrong_ , loudly, before crawling into his tent one last time to do it for him, exasperated, only to kiss him breathless while their knees slid over the slippery material. She kissed him so deep his hands shook, her fingers digging into his jeans right above the knee, her head tilted up to accommodate for his height over her even with both of them kneeling.

He lifted her into his lap with a groan, his forearms tensing with an effort to keep her closer with his hands splayed to grip as much of her ass as possible. He rubbed against her purposefully. To remind her she was wanted. 

They had to leave the tent eventually, especially to make it look like not even a kiss was happening; not just  _ more than. _

She tied her hair up in a ponytail, fixing the mess he’d made of her, before exiting with a perfectly rolled sleeping bag. He followed. 

“They make the bags too small,” he grumbled, and she bit back a conspiratorial laugh. “Impossible to get them back in.”

“You just have to make it fit,” she reminded him with a hint of arrogance. She pushed it into his arms with a little too much of her own gravity, knocking him back, but not enough for anyone else to know how had she slung the pack into his chest before his arms even moved up to cradle it. 

He looked down at her feet; her stuff was all packed. She was here to say goodbye. 

It was like the end of camp for him.

She hefted up her pack with a bittersweet smile.

“I’ll see you around, Ben Solo.”

He settled his hand on her shoulder.

“You’re a catch, Rey.”

 

* * *

 

 

It is a tasteful wedding. If possible, Ben would dare to say low-key. 

He had somewhat expected this; Poe and Finn weren’t going to stay up for weeks doing over complicated crafts for their own nuptials. They had a friend  _ -they were a couple who always had a friend who could fulfill any need at any time- _ who did event planning and they got a great price and the evening is perfect. That easy. 

Ben had not anticipated that.

The decorating scheme is masculine but bright, a lot of browns and reds. Autumnal and cheery. It feels like an actual party; not an explosion of glitter that is only arranged so people feel obligated to take pictures that are more important than being there. Kaydel still takes many, but that’s her thing, and that’s how he first sees Rey before the ceremony. Hunched over for a selfie and grinning that same tense, on-the-spot picture face she made in the drive on the way to the campsite. 

“You’re...smiling,” Poe murmurs suspiciously at him, tying his own bow-tie. 

The wedding party, basically joint at this point without  _ specific  _ sides, has been flitting back and forth for pictures and passing notes between the grooms. They’re in separate rooms to get ready. Ben doesn’t want to be heteronormative; but if they shared a room last night and picked out their tuxes together, why were they doing the  _ ‘don’t look until the wedding’ _ thing?

He’s bitter for more than just being a typical asshole about it.

While the parties mostly moved fluidly between each room, Rey has been mostly relegated to Finn, and Ben has been to Poe. For obvious reasons. Ben being in Finn’s room while he got ready for his wedding would probably feel, to Finn, like running into your high school principal at the grocery store.

He just wants to be in her orbit, and it’s not happening during the time he had been looking forward to spending at least near her.

She does finally dip across the hall to crawl onto Poe’s bed in her bridesmaid’s dress and hand him a polaroid she had just taken of Finn, still shaking in her hand as it develops. It’s of him with his suitcase packed, pretending to flee the hotel. Poe chuckles over it, and tells her to go back and tell Finn that she couldn’t find Poe; he’d already checked out of his room.

The interchange is natural and fluid; her feet tucked under her in the dusty pink velvet she has to wear alongside Rose, Jess, and Kaydel. Her halter neckline is doing a lot for Ben visually, and even in pink, the last color he’d  _ ever- _

Poe is still waiting for a reply.

He reluctantly lifts his eyes off of her.

“Should I be helping you with that?” Ben blurts out, but the delay is noted by the time Poe waves him off.

“No, I can get it. Though if we sent a picture of that to your mom, she’d probably have a heart attack.”

Yeah, Ben doing things for others would seem pretty shocking.

Rey casts him a shy smile as she lifts the train of her skirt to compensate for its length when she’s barefoot and retreats back to Finn. The whole wedding is like swimming to him: Rey is the breath between strokes, a tense glide until he can burst from the surface and breathe for a second. 

Of course, the walk-down-the-aisle-pairs don’t end up in his favor; she walks with Snap. He’s got Rose; who is polite and demure and thinks the whole bear story is valid to deem him a cool enough person. He’ll take that, today, when a lot of people are going to be against him.

When the guests are being seated, the wedding party flits around the entryway of the church, basically the same people they were on the drive to the campsite or six beers into that bonfire, just in formalwear. Ben’s mother was big on appearances; they dressed up to go out to dinner, for school, even to board flights. Stiff clothes meant decorum. Discomfort meant excellence. 

_If it seems like I think I’m a bitch, it’s the fucking heels,_ _and no I won’t take them off_ was a line in his mother’s memoir; a book about being too powerful and too successful to even consider being what society expected of a woman. 

It’s odd to see elegantly dressed Rey still swearing, Snap belching, Kaydel making loaded, filthy, obvious comments about how laid their friends are going to get after the happiest day of their lives. 

The reverence of the occasion is undercut, or maybe even overpowered, by camaraderie.

 

* * *

 

 

_ “I can’t believe not a single person has said anything about that collar.” _

He can breathe again. 

She’s behind him, and there are hands on his shoulders, making him still, and then knuckles brushing the back of his neck as the fabric around his throat becomes slightly more comfortable.

He feels foolish.

“Was it bad?”

He turns over his shoulder, twisting under her hands to check with her. 

She smiles, shaking her head. “Just a little tucked in.”

She adjusts the way it opens at his throat. Her thumb strokes over his adam’s apple when she’s done. 

“There. Now you’re perfect.”

“How do you like your tent?” he blurts out, because he’s dying to know, and he hasn’t talked to her since the trip.

When they were packing up camp and he offered to leave it with Finn to give to her, since he wouldn’t get nearly the use out of it that she would. She wasn’t there to demure, so Finn accepted pretty readily. 

He felt awkward when he noticed the eyes on him. 

Ben never knew how to express he liked someone when other people were watching and they were kind of...impressed with him, and the gesture. 

A little  _ too _ surprised for Ben’s liking, but he didn’t do it to be their friend.

Finn had texted him after he passed his gift onto her; apparently she had wept. 

Poe hadn’t said much about the camping trip; but when he was getting in the car, he had clapped him once on the pack in a bro-ish was that didn’t suit either of them.

“That was good of you, Ben, that meant a lot to Rey and Finn that you’d do that. And me.”

Not that Ben’s hand ever found itself over his dick at the thought of Rey blubbering over a present he gave her. So grateful. So touched.

Not at all.

“I like the inside a lot, but I haven’t taken it out yet,” but her face is bright from the mention of it, “I think I’m saving it for some Ben Solo Glamping.”

He doesn’t know what to say, so he bows his head in a way he hopes means that he would take her up on that. 

Her eyes soften. 

_Oh man._ There’s  _ meaning _ in her expression, and he has to be thoroughly decent in about two minutes…

“I owe you for that, Ben. It really...it was really sweet of you.”

“Maybe I just wanted a way for you to remember me, because it’ll be hard to bring any other guy to sleep alongside you in there.”

He means it to sort of knock the sentiment out of the moment, like he’s pawing fairy dust off of himself sprinkled by some over-eager Tinkerbell, but she shakes her head.

“Wouldn’t dream of taking anyone but you to sleep in our tent.”

A single tear slips down her cheek. He clenches his fist before automatically wiping it away. But because he’s a psychopath; he licks it off his thumb in front of her.

She swallows thickly. 

And then that fucking organ music starts; and she has to trot over to Snap who’s waving her frantically over because  _ they have to go, _ and Ben has to dive back in to feeling like he can’t breathe until he has a moment of her attention again.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s  _ that _ wedding moment Finn and Poe are currently having. Their triumphant, slow-mo, only-have-eyes-for-each-other moment. 

It’s like all the formal responsibility stuff has been handled; first dances, toasts, cake cutting. And they can just breathe, like Ben is dying to, and enjoy being together.

Ben has been through it all. Avoiding his mother. Forced to dance with middle-aged family friends who now objectify him despite knowing him since he was a baby. Pretending to want to try and catch a garter that Finn was apparently wearing the whole time. Drinking a lot of champagne.

Rey cries happy tears while she watches Finn and Poe slouch tiredly into their seats, finally alone for their moment. Praying hands folded to her chest. Watching this happen for them. Overjoyed. 

Ben watches her. Pacing a slow circle behind her.

Her face is a red mess and those tears must slip hot and fast down her cheeks. So ready she doesn’t even have to shudder them out.

They just fall.

He wonders how she can have such an easy relationship with her emotions; to just cry when she needs to cry and let herself accept it. 

He has been dodging glares that make him want to punch something all evening. Honesty is too dangerous.

He does the only thing he can think to. Slips behind her, subtly, bending to whisper in her ear. But there’s no words. 

There’s just his erection pressing into her ass. In appreciation for the waterworks. 

“Really?” she looks back at him; equal parts flabbergasted and amused. “Are you fucking kidding me?  _ Now?” _

He chuckles as he brushes past her. “Just thought you’d want to know.”

 

* * *

 

 

Rey’s not the worst of the wedding criers. 

He takes a breather outside on the patio; an old friend of his father’s had swung by him to vaguely threaten that he was hoping to see Ben  _ ‘getting back on track’ _ like Han would have wanted, and enough is enough. If he can’t prove anything to these people, he’s not going to try. 

Rey arrives moments later, tearless, with cake. 

On a plate with two forks. It’s the kind of massive stack of layers that gives him a toothache on principle. But somehow bearable with two forks. Decadence shared between two forks seems like nothing at all.

She and Ben take the empty patio swing. She’s removed her shoes, accepted the suit jacket he’s shrugged off to drape over her shoulders, and he’s equally comfortable having abandoned his bowtie in the utter silence in all things except praising icing, dueling forks, and stealing sugary rosettes out from under her nose. 

They must have forgotten the patio is meant as a separate space from festivities, exclusive for smokers and dramatic conversations, and may be reserved for those not feeling festive. Which well, he never is, by a long shot, but he thought he was the worst of it. 

Rose bursts off the dance floor like she’s going to collapse the second she steps outside, only to find Rey and Ben and a frosting flower smeared across Rey’s cheek. She had tried to steal it off of Ben’s fork, so he gave it to her...kind of. 

She drops the hem of her skirt she was holding off her feet, her hopelessness compounded to find Rey and Ben flirting in the place she’d been planning to have a massive meltdown. Rey sits up and drops her feet to the ground from the swing’s cushions. She beckons carefully as Rose’s face crumples.

“You okay?” she murmurs when Rose settles herself between them. Ben holds the cake. Unsure what to do as Rey pets Rose’s hair. Rose just sobs.

“Should I leave-?”

Rey sends him a clever look behind Rose’s back. There is something fucked-up about her smile, in the best way, and she shakes her head minutely. 

That’s what it is in her look.  _ Stay. Watch.  _

She rests Rose’s head on her shoulder.

“I’m drunk,” Rose chokes out, “sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s a wedding,” Rey’s a good sport like that. She seems to be trying to pinpoint something in Ben’s eyes as she placates her friend.

“I want him to be happy, I really do.”

_ “Oh.” _ Rey looks uncomfortable, threading her fingers in Rose’s hair. Rose is gripping her like a life raft. This is old news to the both of them, something Ben doesn’t quite understand, but can get the gist of if Rey looks so awkward about it.

“I’m trying. I really am.”

“You did a great job tonight. He is lucky to have a friend like you. You’re still allowed five minutes to be upset about it. Right, Ben?”

He clears his throat. Roped into this, it would seem. Rey’s comfort is genuine; that much he can tell. But that doesn’t exactly mean she doesn’t have two things going on at once. 

“Yeah. I couldn’t even tell you were upset about something.”

Which, coming from him, is a given. That should be the title of his memoir.

She keeps looking at him, like he should do something. Finally, he sighs, and pats Rose's shoulder. 

Not unlike Cassian must have for teenage Rey.

She rolls her eyes. He glares at her, moving his hand up down Rose's arm soothingly. 

She gets softer under his touch. His big hand stroking her skin as she goes limp from the comforting touch. 

This shouldn't-

He has some fucking _problem._

He lifts his hand, swallowing. Rey looks victorious.

“You’ll find someone, Rose. It’s going to be okay.”

_ “I need to not be okay. For five minutes.” _

“We can do that,” Rey leans back, resting Rose half in her lap. 

Okay, this, this is probably what Rey was getting at, he realizes as he watches them cling to each other.

"We've got you," Rey croons, keeping her eyes on Ben.

His hands shake. He strokes one, slow circle on Rose's exposed back. 

She gives a slight whine between her tears. Her spine arches towards his skin.

_ Does every woman want to be seduced when they're hysterically crying? _

Her suspicions were accurate. It is...kind of  _ doing it _ for him; a woman shuddering with sobs in Rey’s lap. But it must be the inclusion of Rey, he was hardly going to look at Rose any differently -except with maybe mild pity- after this. Rey, however, her breast crushed to someone’s head, tremoring with their cries, her lips making soothing sounds…

He wishes he had a camera. 

And Rey has him all figured out; he can tell from the look she gives him.

 

* * *

 

 

Rose leaves them surprisingly quickly; after taking her designated five minutes. 

It’s a gay wedding: are a lot of gay men here who  _ love _ straight women specifically when they’re drunk messes so she has her choice of dance partners for the rest of the evening. 

Rey sits up, cuddling back up in his jacket. She takes the cake from his hands, stealing the last rosette and feasting on it. He doesn’t know what to say, until she breaks the silence.

“That do it for you?”

He laughs softly, not wanting to have to address this part of himself out loud. 

“How’d you know?”

“The way you fucked me in the tent,” she shrugs, “at first I thought it was a sadism thing. But you...you really get off on women crying?”

He shrugs, looking at the patio tiles. “This is a new thing for me, I can’t say I understand it myself.”

She seems to accept this more than outlining the specific baggage that goes with a kink; _this is what I'm into and here's my damage-_

It can be a weird phase he's going through. He likes that he's not the crying-kink guy permanently in her eyes.

"Kind of a fucked up thing to do to Rose..."

Rey looks a little guilty. "She's a massive drunk crier. Notorious for it. I wasn't going to let anything happen, but I just wanted to see."

He smiles at her. 

"I like you a little fucked up, Niima."

It felt like a blessing to learn her full name when he read it the first time on a wedding program.

She smiles, like she likes hearing him say it.

There’s a pregnant pause. She crosses her legs.

“So how do you...accommodate that? Do you watch a lot of torture porn or something?”

He leans his head back in the seat. “No. Jesus. It’s not like a  _ ‘crying because I need you to stop’ _ thing. It’s,” he sighs. Reaches for her. Touches a finger to the center of her forehead.   _ “You _ open up. It is like an instinctual and human thing to want to be closer to someone like that. You’re vulnerable.”

Her nose wrinkles.

“But you  _ never _ are.”

That stings, because he is trying to be. He thought he was getting better at this.

He leans forward, looking at his hands.

“I’m not good at it. It’s not how I deal with negative emotions, and it’s not  _ about _ me. It’s about you. When you’re like that, I want to...build you a cabin in the woods and keep you safe there. It is a distinct impulse, that I need to take care of you.”

He’s said too much, from the way she whistles slowly and sets the plate of decimated cake on the ground.

“My kink,” she replies quietly, “is you building me a cabin in the woods and keeping me safe there.”

He is so happy to murmur, watching her shiver: “I had hoped it would do as much for you as it does for me.”

His tone is dangerous. Because it shows her everything he wants, which is more of her than he could ever know what to do with.

She is silent, watching him carefully, and then after a moment she straddles his thigh. Both hands wrap around his leg, balancing herself. There’s a mess of velvet skirt in the way, but he’s patient, drawing it up her legs until he has workable access to her core.

“Let me take care of you.”

One nuzzle to her face with his and she’s going. She trembles, and it's all coming out. 

One  _ promise _ from him and she’s going. 

He swipes a thumb through her tears. There’s lust like a rumble of thunder through him. 

Licking her face might be a bit extreme. But he does it anyway.

“Always this easy to get you wet?”

His lips pressed to her cheek, not even touching her pussy yet.

She laughs softly, tears dotting her lashes, but there is a genuine melancholy between them. She’s not  _ pretending _ because he likes it. She just holds the door of herself open long enough for him to slip through. Maybe he can ask this from her because she doesn’t have any tears to fake; Rey cries honestly, with a sadness that bewilders him as much as her happiness does. He wants both of those things from her more than anything he’s ever wanted. 

“All I want,” he kisses under her chin, a salty line stinging his lips when  _ -oh god she’s really that open for him- _  “is to shut you up somewhere safe and warm, where no one can find us, and eat your pussy until you stop crying. Even if it takes days. I just want to take all that pain out of you.”

She clings his shoulders, a shudder racking her that she takes solace from against his body. His fingers find her so wet for him. He groans as he rubs her. The skirt and his jacket over her shoulders can hide that they’re doing anything more than furiously making out, but he still hopes there’s no more crying wedding party interruptions.

“Can I get a turn?” She lifts her face from his neck, fingers brushing along his cheek, “with your pain?”

He swallows. 

“I don’t know.”

“I want to,” she kisses him eagerly, “if you’d just give me a chance, I want to see you soften. Sometimes when you look at me, it’s like you want me to do that for you. Want me to hold you down and pry it all out, everything you’re holding in.”

Her bare legs scramble to grind into his hand. He’s got two fingers slipping in, curling up, making her want to float away in the direction his hand pushes. 

She’s overwhelming him, so his thumb draws a nasty circle over her clit. It’s a dirty move, but she nearly falls to one side if not for his other arm around her. He needs her focused on her feelings. He needs to focus on her feelings.

Anything but his.

He holds her hip, hand shoved under her dress, while the other coaxes her gently to buck and writhe, to guide her movements. Sometimes pushing faster than she can go. Sometimes holding back. 

“Are you okay?”

“I’m happy,” her eyes are sparkling, “Or do I have to be sad all the time for this to work?”

He shakes his head, speechless. She rocks against his hand, laughing.

She’s a little too...in control, for what he wants to do to her. It doesn’t feel like he’s earned her trust in that promise. That this is still a game, and that makes him the toy.

He digs in a little harder, fingers starting to feel the ache from hinging inside so insistently.

_ “Oh,” _ she shivers when he touches her insides soft but determined. She’s going to cum. He’s making sure of it; and there’s nothing she can do about how or when or what he’ll do-

Her head falls back, thighs quivering around his leg. A mess in his lap of velvet and muscle and a little cake icing. “Oh, Ben.”

“Just keep kissing me,” he instructs as he strokes the same soft spot, a little deeper, having held something back for her most pliant and vulnerable state. She gives a little gasp of surprise, bearing down, her rippling walls sucking him deep for his faster touches.

Learning he had held something back must startle her. Make her feel helpless.

Or reliant on him, which is what he’s going for.

Her lips fall over his, messy and clumsy. She seems lost in the kiss, her confusion that what she was feeling could feel better taking this whole thing out of her grasp. 

“Keep kissing me,” he repeats over her lips. Thrusting his fingers hard, so the waves don’t stop. She obeys, whimpering into his mouth as her thighs twitch and that orgasm gets prolonged to the point the peak doesn’t exist: instead an enduring plateau.

She fists her hands in his hair and moans against his throat in a sort of begging sound. He laughs against her.

“I’ve got you, let me take care of you.”

She kisses his cheek down to his neck. Breathing heavily. Clinging to his shoulders. 

There’s a little whine and a shudder of her hips; up and off and then back down to a resting position over his lap, that he knows ends her torment. There’s a finality to it; what’s done is done, like a blackout at the end of a scene. 

They’re alone behind the curtain, and they’re still embracing amidst the applause.

She laughs breathlessly.

“You’re a dangerous man, Ben Solo.”

He kisses her sweaty temple. Even he feels limp after all that. They're both spent, a tangle of bodies not able to move. She shudders when he removes his cramping hand out from under her skirt.

“You’re a certified catch, Rey Niima.”

There’s not much filthier they can get outside on a patio with friends and family filling a reception hall inside; but it is maybe too filthy anyway.

She shivers. Like she’s seen a ghost.

“You need to be careful when you say that to me,” she warns, limp from her orgasm, and he smiles as if her telling him that was supposed to make him say it any less than he plans on.

“You deserve to hear it.”

She kisses him, actually quite demurely. “I like you.”

“Thanks. You’ve still got frosting on you.”

She has this blissed-out smile, though he hasn’t fucked her to the point of tears yet and he’d sort of like to try...

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”

But this is pretty amazing as is.

“Well,” she leans back into the far corner of the swing. Keeping the jacket on. Making him chase. “Get it off.”

He swipes his thumb through it first, dipping the sugar past her lips. She dutifully sucks, taking his thumb tightly into her mouth, eying him coyly.

_ Her eyes full of happy tears while she sucks his cock- _

He may never be able to handle her. But it’s like fire; he always wants to keep playing with it until nothing is left. 

“But before that, can you possibly give me Rose’s number?”


	4. Chapter 4

He doesn’t see Rey immediately after that. Which does suck, that there’s no obvious get-together where they can casually bump into each other. He likes the excuse of proximity more than the vulnerability of seeking it out. But that means weeks without Rey, and without the next breath of air or even knowing when it’s coming next.

Finn and Poe are happily adjusting to married life; the bacchanal doesn’t need witnesses or participants. He doesn’t know if he should drop hints about holidays or baby showers.

Maybe this was a moment in time he can think back on and try not to cry over. Maybe she’s  _ his _ Cassian; and he’ll just try to look back fondly even when it ended because it had to.

So she texts him first. Which he realizes didn’t even  _ occur _ to him to do, almost too easy or even too vulnerable, when his phone screen lights up with  _ Hey it’s Rey. _

He really should have just texted her. Self-imposed isolation fuzzes his brain, makes him forget he’s an adult who can do these things. He’s typed a reply before he even thinks  _ how _ to reply, it’s sending before he realizes he could have tried to sound cooler. 

**Hey. How are you?**

Immediate response. No games: 

_ Not so good. _

If she didn’t have his full attention before, she has no chance of losing it now.

**Shit. Do you need anything?**

_ A cabin. _

He lets out a sad sigh. Fuck. 

He’s pulled up Airbnb to find anything that will let them stay there for an undisclosed amount of time starting _ immediately _ before she sends a second message;

_ But right now wherever you are is fine, as long as you do that other thing. _

**I can come to you.**

_ Even better. I may have broken something. _

**A bone?**

_ A lamp. _

 

* * *

 

 

He’s been to the address before when Poe and Finn picked her up for the trip. The building feels taller when approaching on foot. 

She answers his knock with maybe three breath’s wait. 

Her eyes are kind of foggy, she seems to have calmed herself down, reigned it in, but he still can barely wrap his head around  _ why _ he’s here. Just that she called to him. Just that he needed to come.

_ “Hi,” _ she sighs weakly, on the exhale of someone previously crying or about to cry. Her face is very red. He tucks her into her own apartment, throat chording with anxiety, touching her shoulders and arms. Crowding her, like a dog sniffing in investigation. Maybe because he can breathe again.

“What’s wrong?”

And it’s not an _oh-shucks-just-being-a-crazy-girl_ answer, which he immediately adores about her. Rey doesn't dismiss. She sort of twists her upturned hands around the air in front of her, her face reddening.

“Finn hasn’t been answering me. And I know he’s fine, we're fine, and I can’t expect him to respond to  _ everything: _ but when I realize I’m upset because he has less time for our friendship now it opens this huge psychological crack inside me and I’m this disaster…”

He’s pulling her close, aiding in body heat and little else, his ear pressed to hers and she doesn’t even pause to lock her arms around him as she goes on her tangent:

“...because there was no one else there for me growing up, except him, and Cassian, and those few weeks at camp and everything’s changing; I lose my parents, I lose Cassian, I lose camp, Han, and now Finn…”

He tries not to wince at the mention of his father. 

There are mourners for Han. 

He’s just never been this close to one.

“Where’s your bedroom, sweet thing?” he murmurs into her hair, walking her backwards from the entryway. 

“To the left,” she clings at the back of his neck as he lifts her to wrap her legs around him, “oh, Jesus, you really weren’t kidding.”

“I’m not trivializing your suffering,” he grits out when he rests her around his waist. She has to know what’s pressing between her thighs, “you’re just... _ oh fuck you weren’t kidding about that lamp.” _

There’s broken glass in a dustpan in the corner of her living room.

“You never clean while you cry?” she laughs, shuddering close, dancing on the line between both states. “Methodically? Like you’re hiding a crime scene?”

He finds her bedroom. Paradise.

“Depends on what I’m crying after. Triple homicide? Definitely.”

He sets her down on her bed. There’s a pregnant pause as he stands, looking down at her. 

How does one dive into this? It’s one thing to already be having sex when the tears start flowing. It’s another to rush to a crying woman to take care of her when she never needed you to do that from the start.

He swallows, using the pause to take his shirt off. A gamble, in case she changes her mind, because putting it right back on would definitely feel pretty terrible.

She rests her brow against the skin of his stomach. Then her cheek. He cradles her head, looking down, feeling massive, and allowing her to get sucked into his orbit. He threads his fingers through her hair.

"Talk to me," he urges, and she shrugs, wrapping her arms around his thick torso.

"Finn's moving on. He's entering a new phase in his life. You don't realize how trapped you are until you see someone else finally able to leave."

She looks around awkwardly. Twisting her mouth up. Finding something...right to say. Maybe coy. 

“and I think you just like me for the daddy issues.”

He crouches at her feet, swiping his thumb through the hot, wet rush coming out from her translucent lids. 

“You don’t have to laugh to prove anything. You don’t have to make it a funny story when you’re upset about something. You don’t have to change it to make it easier for me. I’ll listen anyway.”

She places her hands on his shoulders. Taking a deep breath. He looks up at her, savoring the way her micro-expressions tell him so much. Every little twitch.

“Everyone leaves me,” she mumbles, her tone unaltered now, losing some attempt to be cooler than her insecurities. He wants to kiss that swollen mouth.

And so he does.

“I’m here,” he offers gently, stroking her hair. “How long did that take?”

_“Oh God,”_ she lets him slide her sweatpants down her legs, “you sniffed out the scent of tears, I’m sure you have a sixth sense…”

He drops the pants in a messy pile on the floor.

“You called _me,_ sweetheart,” he climbs over her on the mattress, bearing down with kisses she can’t hide from. “So glad you did. Tell me more.”

Their broken pieces fit together. She goes limp under him, his weight, the way he presses into her. His huge hands stroke up and down her bare legs.

No panties. He can’t tell if it was in preparation for this or if she hasn’t left the house yet today. Moping. Wondering if she should call.

“I don’t have anyone to talk to.”

“You can talk to me.”

“You don’t talk back,” she hints, wrapping her legs around him. 

Maybe that’s why it had to get to this point for her to reach him. He didn’t offer much of himself, he can see that start to rub her to wrong way.

“Has anyone,” he lifts himself off of her. Loses his words for a second at the afternoon light spilled across her hair. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a surprisingly pretty crier?”

In an instant, she glows. Even if she’s trying to look pissed at him.  _ “Bastard.” _

“No, really. Your face crinkles the same way when you smile. You bare teeth either way. It’s very human.” He drops one foot onto the floor to catch himself while falling back to his crouch. 

Her shirt is settled over her waist; bare from her navel down. There’s a tremble to her legs, hanging from the knees over the edge of the bed, for being looked at so closely.

He can’t help but treat this nervousness a bit sadistically, swiping a finger through her folds once, then parting her lips obscenely so the air between them chills her just enough. She gasps softly.

“Pretty here, too,” he promises, not looking away from her face until she has to meet his eyes with a meek nod. 

He kisses her inner thigh, tapping her stomach to get her attention. “I don’t need to talk much, lately. And I’m not here to talk. I’m here to make it all better, isn’t that right?”

She sits up on her hands to look down at him.

“I liked when you treated me like it was all under control,” she tilts her head to the side, “it awakens some pretty dark things in me.”

“Let them out.”

She guides his head towards her now-open legs. He doesn’t need any more hint than that.

“I’ll never leave you,” he exhales, lapping once at her clit, shaking his head. “Oh no. I won’t. Not this sweet girl.”

“Ben…” she tenses her thighs around his head.  _ “Jesus.” _

His lips press down, sucking her tight clit between them and playing it with gentle pumps of suction. She tries to arch off the bed. He won’t let her.

Then he lifts off when she’s overstimulated and gasping.

“It must be so hard to be the last person to leave this place.”

He found it, not the physical spot, his tongue is still searching viciously for that, but the psychological one that she was baiting him to look for. 

His perfect little trail guide would never let him get lost. Not even in her.

Fat, glossy tears slip down her cheeks. 

“No,” she tries to pry him off what he’s found, but he holds tighter. His fingers fill her wet cunt.

“You’re not alone, Rey. No. Not at all. Look who’s got you.”

_ “Ahhnn,” _ she throws an arm over her eyes, shuddering under him. He curls those thick fingers inside, all soaked from her arousal. 

“Does it ever stop?” he can’t stop prodding at her, it seems, and she shakes apart with a whimper, “the feeling it’s all going to vanish again?”

She’s grabbing him. Holy shit, it’s almost like she  _ needs  _ him. 

“Tell me,” he presses, and her lips fall open. There’s a  _ crunch _ to her whole face, the way she arches and goes silent lets him know it may be an orgasm. Everything squeezing at once.

_ “Oh,” _ she lets go just as quickly, the walls of her cunt dancing around his still-thrusting fingers. “I get scared.”

Her hands are rested palms-up by her head, the ultimate show of surrender, and she blinks at the ceiling.

She's trembling, those long legs shaking, and he keeps stroking. She's is confessing through the trance he has her under. 

“I feel scared all the time,” she swallows, her chest shuddering. Attentive, eyes on her face, he lowers his lips to her clit again. She  _ screams _ this time, her legs fighting against the air that can’t ground her enough to ride his face.

“Don’t be.”

“I have to be.”

“I’m here.”

She sighs, her neck arching and then the breath cracking as she starts shaking again. Tormented. Pleasured.

She yanks him up by the hair.

“Kiss me,” she orders, and his sex-slick lips meet hers.

She turns her chin away,  _ “keep kissing.” _

He climbs up onto his knees on the mattress, straddling her hips. Lips working. Cheek, temple, neck, jaw. He keeps going, as instructed. She holds him over her. Her chest fluttering like a little hummingbird. 

“I don’t like to be ignored,” she points out after a moment of silence and just kissing, raising her eyebrows as he lifts off to look down at her.

Finn?

Or.

Oh,  _ fuck. _

She gives him a look to still his tongue, as they are talking about “Finn” in the most violent clench of air-quotes possible. "It makes me feel like a helpless kid again."

He's numb for a second. 

"I'm really sorry."

She shrugs, touching his chest, an intimacy easier than this current conversation. 

"I'm over it, now that I know how to tempt you," she flutters the focus of her eyes all around the room. Straddling her hips, he feels large and slightly stupid. She's pinned under him, expecting him to know what to do next as she reprimands him.

"I'm sorry," he repeats leaning down to kiss her. "I did hurt you, didn't I? And then I said all those things. Sweetheart, I'm sorry. I'm right here. All you had to do was ask."

She nods, "I shouldn't have been such a girl."

He shakes his head, "I should have called you."

He holds her down, looking in her eyes. They're watery, but fiercer than the weepy venting about Finn. "I'm sorry. I...I don't know what I'm good for."

"This, apparently." She lets out a shaky laugh. "Whatever it is."

He runs a hand flat down her stomach, cupping her sex.

"Making it better?"

She nods, looking up at him with naked vulnerability as he worms her t-shirt up over her ribcage. No bra.

He exposes her breasts as though he can only get a little peek, like they're not in a private bedroom, and he licks her nipples where they sit right under the bunched-up hem. It feels _dirty_ this way, in the way dirty feels when you're young, dirty as in not bad but just new and scary and overwhelming.

"Make it better," she pleads, "lock me away and make it better."

He sucks attentively, her bare hips wriggling under his thighs. Her hands work open his belt, drawing his jeans down his hips and clutching his ass in her hands.

"Is it working?"

She clutches his hair as he draws his pants down his legs, guiding her back up the bed so she's not lying perpendicular on it. He's tall, he needs all the length he can get for this. 

"Yeah," she nods. 

He finds himself on top of her again, her skin craving contact with his. Like she's burrowing in him.

"Then spread your legs sweetheart. I'll make all the bad stuff go away."

 

* * *

He does.

For a short while. 

But it makes for a good excuse to see each other again. Her needing comfort. There's a few times she doesn't even explain why, just keeps going until he rips her clothes off and ravages her -big arms around her and body folding her so small and needy for him- until she clears her throat like they're out of the woods.

Then they politely get dressed and act like he came over to fix her sink or something. 

"I feel like you're my therapist," she jokes, looking sheepish, as he combs his fingers into her sweaty hair. 

He grimaces. "Don't like therapy. I like being constructive with grief, like having a lot of sex with someone you met while camping."

She rests her head on his chest.

"You do, you know. Make me feel safe. Even without the cabin."

"I'm still building it," he promises, a running joke that the cabin was in-progress, Ben abandoning the efforts to construct it with his bare hands while at her beck and call so it wasn't finished for them just yet.

This is the oddest context for casual sex he's ever had. Because it's not casual. It's wild and needy and emotional and raw. But she's not his girlfriend, they only meet at her place, and she's the only one revealing anything. He is the one handling her emotional upkeep; clearing gutters so the tears don't get clogged in her head.

And they like it.

She likes that he wants her in such an open and honest way.

He likes that she is honest and open.

And they like spending time together, even when they are clumsy fitting in to each other. He is never quick to get dressed and leave.

They linger, laughing a lot.

He's never _happy_ that she's crying. Even if it's proven-by-the-universe at this point that if she is  _he will get laid;_ it's always a panic response. Dropping everything, like the house flooded. It's an emergency, of the utmost urgency for him to handle.

Every time she asks for him, he comes.

Then she does too.

 

* * *

 

 

“What I want to do with you,” she pauses a little longer than necessary so he really pays attention, “I have  _ never _ done with anyone else.”

Then _slams_ the two shots she holds in her fists. One after the other.

He watches with mild horror.

“I really...don’t feel comfortable keeping up with that,” he nods to the empty glasses as she signals the bartender for more. The rest of the bar is rustling with Friday night activity. They’re not used to being with each other around so many other people.

Part of the point of their relationship is providing a safe, private place to be a disaster.

"I love this," he had told her after the first mid-afternoon tear-filled booty call. "You can call me for this _any time."_

Rey, a woman who knew what she wanted, took him up on it.

It's always random. Sometimes after work, or on weekends, one time she took a personal day so he took one two. No matter what, the sex is a fucking marathon. He can't keep her distracted or sated enough with his tongue and fingers and cock. She always wants more, always has a way to rip open this well inside her that he needs to plug up. 

She's not a particularly sad person, which is what astounds him. She's been hiding it maybe for so long that when he shows up she revels in letting it happen. It might attribute to the secrecy. He gets a very specific Rey, just as Rey gets a very specific Ben.

He’s fine with her no-strings-attached approach to their relationship, or  _ only _ strings, untangled swiftly so they could then jet off to the end rope of said strings and come back tangled once again. It’s maintenance; required, but not something you seek out when you don’t need it. It's not frequent enough for his liking, but he finds her excuses to cry getting weaker each time he comes and some days she just cries _catharsis_ when she buries her face in his chest when he walks through the door. 

Who is he to belittle her feelings while his hands are already clutching her ass.

Yet they’ve had only cozy interactions, snippets of intimacy; his face pressed to her belly, her arms around him, weepy if she needs to be and doting if he feels the mood. One Sunday they spent the whole day watching sad movies and seeing what was going to make her break. She had a reasonable relationship with her tears, a cleansing one; so she could squeeze out a genuine reaction for him to absolutely lose his mind trying to handle. 

She has not had to fake it once, and when it came to the half of the dual truth in that statement that applies to _crying,_ he feels invigorated and a little protective by her. 

He really likes the other part too.

But he especially likes the way it's turned into a practice of caring; the cuddling on her couch, the searching for food and water when she's cried out, the attempts to make her smile or laugh when the superficiality of a certain problem -mean customers, a celebrity dying, realizing she is too old and mature to ever get a piggy-back ride again- overwhelms even his thirst for her tears.

They’re fucked up, but it works, especially when he finds himself texting her a _‘Soldier Comes Home to His Dog’_ video during the workweek.

_ Oh my God. _ Is her reply.  _ I’m sobbing. _

**Sorry. Can you send pictures?**

Now she's in a bar, slamming shots like the world is going to end, and this foray into being together in public is an odd one to say the least.

“I have to be drunk to do this,” she rushes out dryly, like he could never understand. If he was more of an asshole, and not emotionally invested in everything she does, he might find this charming and sexy. But she’s downing her third shot in as many minutes and handing him one to follow.

“Not thanks,” he fumbles with his keys, “maybe we should leave…”

To get her safely home, and nothing else. 

“Yeah, I’m ready to go-”

His stomach drops. He's not sure if this is loosening her up for a tortured role-play, confession of murder, or anal sex. Either way, whatever she’s initiating…

“-because I need you to drive me to Target.”

Her face challenges him. One brow raised.  _ Take the bait, Ben, _ it tells him.

He swings his keys around his fingers just once. She watches, a flush forming on her cheeks as he stays silent.

“Don’t you want to know what I have only ever wanted to do with you?”

Beseeching, fearing rejection. A single tear spills down her cheek. Glimmers under the bar light. Loosened by booze, but also from needing him. 

It’s a reward system, at this point. Being empathetic as a sexual exploit. 

Immediately intrigued, he follows her instructions. 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s a tiny, silver bomber jacket that does it. 

Her fingers brush the little sleeve. 

She’s  _ weeping. _

“Baby clothes?” he stands behind her in the 10-12 Months section, almost too scared to touch her. She nods, sniffling.

She picks up a fluffy pink hat with cat ears and slides it over her fist, where it's a taut fit, as if to show him the delicacy of the object. He sighs, apprehensive, and wraps his arms around her. Chin rested on the top of her head.

A puffy blue jacket sends her into a conniption. It’s the kind of face where the corners of her mouth and eyes downturn because something is too cute to be allowed to exist.

She hiccups. 

“I have to be drunk, but yeah. Baby clothes make me cry.”

_ “How does one even learn this?” _

She ignores the question.

“They’re  _ so small.” _

 He kisses her cheek. "What you need is an American Girl Doll."

Rey laughs, still in his arms, observing a wall of stagnant, hanging garments like it's an aquarium and a memorial all at once. Leisure and grief spun into one.

"Is this a ploy to get me to bring you little hats and gloves? If it gets you going, it gets me going, so fair warning. Maybe clear out some closet space."

Her head rests back on his chest with a happy sigh.

"You're good to me, Solo."

And she sobers for a second. 

One thing she hasn't shared is how much she misses his father. The camping trip she brought up his face, the first afternoon she mentioned losing him, but since then he has steered her pretty adamantly away from the topic.

Even now, the one who treasures every tear and quiver her eyes can produce, he is herding her out of the aisle to the toy section for a baby doll she can put all the clothes she wants on and will never grow up. It gets her to laugh, and her tears before were hardly melancholy, so he's surprised how much fun they're having. Her agonizing about _how something could be so cute_ is a new one, but he'll savor it. Just like he savors the excuses to see each other that become flimsier and flimsier. 

_Anniversary of Cassian's death._

_There was a very sick-looking homeless guy on the walk home._

_Finn said he's never been happier and that hurt her a lot._

_Getting high and watching Moulin Rouge._

She’s still drunk when he leads her back to the car, but she’s going straight home and he’s not touching her. He bought her a soft pretzel from whatever restaurant had a deal with the store to serve frozen, microwaved versions of their delicacies. 

He’s not paying attention further than getting her to eat it, to walk in a straight line, to do anything but munch happily on a pretzel while he guides her with an arm around her shoulders. 

“Ben,” she hiccups, “Thank you for sharing this with me.”

He rolls his eyes, dipping to kiss the downy blonde hairs on the nape of her neck. “You’re insane.”

“Little baby outfit,” she smiles to herself, singing it a little. “Dress you up in a little baby outfit.”

“I’m a grown man, Rey.”

 He digs his keys from his pocket to unlock the car. She sags against him, eyes parallel to the ground.

“Why didn’t you visit your father?”

Her voice is little; and it shudders with genuine tears. Weepy drunk. He hasn't gotten, aside from the baby clothes, weepy _and_ drunk from her. 

He stops dead in the parking lot, her face tucked into his neck.

She clicks her dry tongue, wetting her lips, and keeps pushing:

“There was a little time. You…”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She falls back on her heels, wobbling. Maybe because he stepped away from her to open the passenger side door.

Rey shoves her hands in her jacket pockets.

“Ben,” her face is so sad. 

She’s not supposed to do this. Not to him. It is too massive and painful. “Don’t pretend that I’m too dumb to get it. _I was there.”_

"You weren't when he and I stopped talking."

She looks unimpressed with his dismissal. And to be fair, it feels weaker and weaker each time she tries to get him to talk to her. After everything she's said, it is unfair.

But he can't.

"No, I was just there at the end of his life."

He firms up the line of his mouth.

"Just let me take you home."

"I'm not getting in the car," She squares her chin. "Why did you hate your father?"

He looks at the door his still touches his hand to and wants to slam it shut.

"I didn't hate him. Rey, it's complicated. Sweetheart, get in the car."

"I let you see _everything,_ Ben. Why can't you let me do the same?"

"Because I don't work like that."

She covers her mouth with her hand. 

Now he's done it. Now he's really made her cry.

"So what, everything I give you, I can't get in return? The trust and the faith and the intimacy? It only matters when it satisfies some kink-"

Now he does slam the door.

"Stop it," he steps closer, holding her elbows. "Rey. It's not a kink. I don't know what it is. I was never trying to use you. But when I look at you like this, I need to do something."

"Then fucking _talk to me."_

She takes a few wobbly steps back. 

"Rey, I need to take you home."

"No. I don't like this. I want to feel like you trust me."

"You're drunk," he pleads.

"Calling a cab," she pulls her phone out, and just as easily as her walls crumble for him, they come back up. She stumbles across the empty parking lot.

"I'm not _putting you in a cab-"_

"Fine," she twists away, trotting towards the store, "I'll call Finn."

"Rey!" he shouts this time, catching her in his arms as she tries to twist away. She gives a frustrated yelp, kicking when he lifts her feet off the ground. 

"Sweetheart. You're drunk. You're upset."

This does little to soothe her. Maybe it's the tone, of the ungracious way he treats her tears this time around. 

He swallows, hunched over her.

"And I'm here. Let me fix it. Let me make it better."

She hunches down farther, him nearly doubled over her shaking body.

"I wish I understood," she's so quiet. He sees tears drop from her nose and land, fat and wet, in circles on the pavement at their feet, "what you had. And what you threw away."

He sighs fiercely, kissing the back of her neck like it's the only thing keeping him from biting it.

"I'm scared if I told you, you still wouldn't."

He feels her twist, their hunched bodies lift in unison, so she can turn her head and look up at the stars.

Hopeless bastard looks up too. Holding her tight because he feels close to losing her.

She may be drunk, but she means it;

"Try me, Ben Solo. Just fucking try and see if you could ever scare me away."

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know a lot of people find the subject of a pet -especially a dog- dying to be triggering or even just a topic you want to avoid....um yeah this chapter is a lot of that process so don't kill me I warned you.

They lapse into an awkward period.

He delivers her home after the fight in the parking lot. Makes sure she’s drunk enough water and stocked well with more at her bedside for when she wakes up. He strokes her hair until she falls asleep. Doesn’t know how to talk about what she’s going to want to keep talking about.

So he leaves.

He sends her texts asking to let him know when she wakes up, he asks how she’s feeling when she does, and for the most part tries to distance himself from that confrontation that he hoped would do unresolved. Because the resolution was either do as she wanted; feel things he didn’t want to feel. Or have her figure out he was never going to be the sensitive, open soul she needed and move on. 

Prolonging that realization is a dangerous game, so close to the chest he finds himself unable to breathe at random moments throughout his days, even though he hasn’t seen her in weeks.

He doesn’t know how to prove a single thing to her. And she has placed herself in the position to prove she can’t be pushed away so easily. 

He gets little updates, about things that matter to her. 

**Finn and Poe’s housewarming party. They said you were invited. You should have come! The idea of picking out a couch with someone I love actually moved me to tears about halfway through the party. We could have moved some of the coats off the guest bed, made an evening of it.**

**You know how smell is the strongest sense memory? I was hiking today, and I closed my eyes at the top of the mountain, and I smelled** **_camp._ ** **How many years have I been a trail guide, and I still smell camp when I’m out in the woods? Shouldn’t I have replaced those memories? I don’t know if I’m ready to move on, it felt like the only place I was home.**

And they do matter to him. They make his throat go dry, his stomach ache, his breath anxious and panicky. She skirts his compulsion to fix with the invitation to act on emotions he wants to soothe.

But there’s no  _ come over. _

She opens and shuts herself swiftly, flinging out these feelings into his lap for him to sort through while she’s gone.

He isn't strong enough to bring them together again.

But only one thing on the planet is.

 

* * *

 

He didn’t even think that dog was still alive; he was so fucking old that it was a logical conclusion Ben had buried in  _ not thinking too hard  _ about it, but that doesn’t recuse him from this.

His mother, on the phone, is able to deliver the news to him only because Rey texted moments earlier demanding he not ignore it:  **please answer your mother’s incoming call it is an emergency.**

“I’ve spent the mourning at the vet,” his mother’s deep voice has the tired, almost nasal pinch to it that she gets under extreme duress, “I’ve spent  _ the last three months _ at the vet. I can't prolong the suffering anymore. It's time. I think it would be good of you to come home and say goodbye to Chewie.”

He stares at his computer screen, the images and text shattering into blue pixelated light. His mouth is dry. Tongue clicking uselessly.

“I didn’t know you had him,” he finally responds stupidly, and Leia sighs.

“If you thought I would get rid of your father’s dog when he was sick, then I don’t even know how I can repair your perception of me. But don’t worry about me. Say goodbye to your dog. There isn’t much time.”

“I will -I’ll try,” he cuts himself off, the eternal excuse, “I’ll see if I can swing by this afternoon, but work is crazy right now, and-

He did not sign up for spending his afternoon at his mother’s house weeping over a dying dog he already couldn’t handle thinking about being dead.

He cuts her off with a brief hang-up when she tries to argue with him, breathing heavily.

His phone lights up with a text. Before he flings it at the wall, he sees it’s from Rey:

**I’m here. He’s on my lap. Comfortable. But I need you here.**

 

* * *

 

 

His mother opens the door, for once without judgement, and hands him the white mug of coffee everyone receives in a kitchen hosting a tragedy. Poe and Finn are there, Rose even crying into a plate of cookies, and a few people were in the driveway that he just missed when he arrived. 

There would be more people mourning this dog than there would be mourning him.

“What did the vet say?” he manages, trying to take a sip without his hands shaking, so instead he rests the mug on the counter. Tries to glaze over his eyes to the familiar sight of the kitchen.

“He’s old,” Leia shrugs like it’s as hopeless as that; a lump rises in his throat as he nods. The answer was obvious. He was stupid to even ask. “He’s been blind for a few years. Really deaf too. He’s held on, I mean, Poe and Rey and Finn would visit him a lot, he was active even when he was slower. He got walks and he got played with, he got attention. It was a good life, and a long one, after all the fast food your father fed him.”

She tries to smile at him, but he can’t...look at anyone. He just nods, numb.

"I did...everything I could, Ben."

And nothing about this day is going to _just_ be about this fucking dog, was it?

“Give him some time with Chewie,” Leia mutters, waving Poe away from the pine-green lump of cushions at the edge of the living room. She looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks.

Rey is revealed as Poe steps aside, unmoved by the order, Chewie’s head rested in her lap. Apparently it doesn’t apply to her to leave Ben alone as Leia clears out the kitchen. 

His face is completely gray now, his coat sort of waxy-looking. Ben just stares at him, unmoved. Why is he visiting a blind dog who wouldn’t even remember him? He took off of  _ work _ for this, he was going to get laughed out of the office if his departure was questioned tomorrow.

Rey’s huge eyes lock on his face like she’s trying to drag him to her side through sight alone. He sighs, and settles himself on the floor across from her. 

She’s scratching Chewie’s ear, the dog so serene and asleep, but she touches his arm with her free hand. 

“Good boy…” she croons to the dog in her arms, and he stiffens.

_ “He can’t hear you.” _

She gestures to her chest, which presses to Chewie’s brow. “He can sense the vibrations. He knows.”

Ben can’t do anything but snort incredulously.

“You could have mentioned he was blind and deaf before I came all this way.”

Something crosses her expression, sharp and sick, but she tamps it down, trying to be empathetic.

“Just…” she slides her hand down his arm gently, catching his hand. She brings it to Chewie’s snuffling muzzle, steady and slow from the pain medication, but there’s this tautness of breath for a moment, shallow, and…

Chewie lifts his head, blindly surging forward to tuck his face against Ben’s chest. Sniffing. Wiggling. Whimpering.

Welcoming him home.

He holds the dog’s head steady in his hands, scratching his ears as those massive front paws hit his chest. He tries to hold the mix of happiness and indescribable pain inside his throat, but Rey is laughing gently, trying to soothe the excited dog with her hands moving down Chewie’s upright spine. She’s crying too, but Ben, he made her... _ happy, _ by doing this.

“Are you okay?” she murmurs, dipping out from behind the wriggling, yelping dog to gauge his expression.

He swallows.

_ “Don’t ask me that.” _

She rears back.

Ben has been pissy, offensive, and rude to her. That in itself might suffice the warnings she’s been given about him.

She has never seen  _ furious. _

“I’m...Ben. You had to be here.”

“I really fucking didn’t,” and his tone is curtailed by Chewie pressing to him, back on four feet, with his side to try and wrap as much of his body around Ben as possible. It fucking stings, how happy this animal is, and he still snuggles the dog to his chest, but he is looking at Rey like she cut his fucking hand off.

He doesn’t need to be made guilty by her about a dog he’s neglected. 

He doesn’t need to be forced back into a family he never belonged in. Not by anyone, but especially her.

“Ben, I’m sorry,” she whispers, “but Chewie…”

“This wasn’t for him. This was for  _ you,” _ he snaps at her, his tone lethal, and Rey rests her shoulders back against the wall behind her. Her face is completely shut off from him. He can see her power down those emotions she was once so open with; unable to tolerate his wrath.

She’s shaking.

Between them, Chewie flops down in his lap. His dog since childhood. He wasted so many years and now he’s just going to  _ die- _

“I could have gone my whole life…” he is breathing unsteadily, “why the fuck do you care about being there at the end so much? It’s not going to _ fix  _ anything-”

"Because the chance you have is more than other people get."

"These aren't _your_ problems, Rey."

“Okay, enough,” Poe is offering Rey his hand, diplomatically sliding her away from where Ben has her pinned to the sliding glass doors. Rescuing her. It is only then Ben realizes he’s been yelling in her face, “We’re all upset. This is one of the hardest things to go through.”

“Give him some space,” Leia sweeps in cautiously, coffee, another mug of coffee, pressed into Rey’s hand as she trembles, hunched and weak-limbed like she just threw up. She’s very clearly crying, and to see that, for him, is not like before. It’s remorse unlike anything he’s ever felt, “Ben-”

He knows that tone from his mother.

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down.”

It’s the kind of shout that has everyone in the room lift their hands like they’re going to cover their faces. 

The kind of yell that makes everyone feel like they’re going to get hit. 

Chewie whines, but he’s frozen, clinging to him like he can’t let go because when it stops, it will have been the last time.

Someone’s sitting down behind him. Placing a gentle hand on his shoulder.

A larger hand than he expects.

He can hear Rey from the other room, crying, in an ironic turn of events Rose is there comforting her.

“Ben,” Finn clears his throat from behind him, “everyone in this room is wondering how this is ever going to feel okay again. That’s all we have. That we all can feel the same way together.”

This is good. This a good way to choke it back down.

“You’re right, you’re right,” he swallows again, scratching Chewie at the back of his neck. His dog...feels so much smaller than he once was. They were the same height once, Ben’s arm slung around Chewie’s neck and toddling around this kitchen _ -how fucking old was this dog??-  _ and says the lamest good bye in history to someone who deserved a lot more,  “good to see you, bud.”

It’s like no one can look at him when he stands. He’s glad of it. His legs are shaking. 

“Mom,” he has adapted to being unfeeling, to normal, he braves a kiss pressed to his mother’s brow. He vaguely remembers her getting one of the same at the wedding, and the few other times he’s seen her in the past few years.

She takes it with as much knowing incredulity now as she did all those other times.

“You can stay, Ben,” she offers weakly, “we’d like for you to stay.”

“Sorry for freaking out,” he shrugs her off, “I have to go.”

Poe is looking at him like he’s making a severe mistake, while Ben backs out of the kitchen. 

“Ben, we’re all really emotional. It’s okay.”

He locks eyes on a discolored patch on the wall across from him. Finn is petting Chewie, the dog comfortably back to sleep, and Rey is creeping in from around the corner of the front room.

Where the paint didn’t quite match. Roughly patched over.

He had put his fist through that wall, once. Because he felt too much.

“Yeah,” Ben nods, digging his keys out of his jacket pocket. “It sucks. He was a good dog.”

As though he wasn’t alive on the floor right now.

He’s trying to unlock his car with shaking hands when Rey leaps down from the back porch, skipping the steps entirely. She stuffs her hands in her sheepskin jacket pockets. 

Looking like a co-pilot.

"This is what you fucking got yourself into," he shakes his head, unable to look at her.

Her eyes are red, her nose is runny, and she’s out of breath.

“I am going with you,” she tells him firmly.

He seals his mouth shut, his entire body vibrating with how wrong this is. 

“Don’t you want to be at his deathbed? You're a regular fixture at those.”

She straightens her chin, unafraid. 

“I want to be here for you.”

 

* * *

 

 

He lets her into his apartment. So stupid. All he wants to do is drink until he falls asleep.

She paces the hallway in front of the kitchen, twirling in those boots she always wears. Examining his space. Skirting the edges.

The car ride over went great. Really great. She tried to talk to him and he told her to shut the fuck up until he could just get home. 

Then they sat in silence.

He really should have told her to let him go, but he was too weak. He wanted her here, selfishly; and he was not in a place where he could turn on a dime if he started to treat her badly.

Really proving his worth to someone who had only been kind, open, and genuine with him this whole time.

She wanders through his apartment with purpose. He watches from the door as she vanishes into his bedroom like she’s been in there a hundred times. Like she lives here.

He is too curious not to follow, but he hopes she hasn’t gone there as an invitation. This is not his kind of foreplay, being on her side of things.

Though he does start to understand how left in the lurch she feels, opening herself up to him when she felt like this. She was braver than him. She consented to adventure. 

Just as soon as he enters, she’s leaving. She dug through his closet as has a neatly-folded set of comfortable clothes pressed in her hands. Sweats, a tee shirt. She presses them to his chest insistently. 

“Why?” he blurts out, and Rey glares up at him.

“Because I want you to be comfortable,” she snaps, her tone loathsome, and he wants to nip the tip of her nose. Just a little mean.

She leaves him to undress, then it’s blatantly obvious that the modesty is for mental nakedness, not sexual. Which makes sense. He fucked her doggy style once while they binge-watched elaborate proposal videos on his phone. Not after, _while._

There was very literal mystery left between them, on her side of things.

she's clearly tired of that being one-sided.

He gets changed alone in his room, breathing heavily. It helps. It helps him calm down. He just needs to gently herd her out of the apartment, break something, and take a sleeping pill. 

He walks numbly out of his bedroom, her eyes tracing his movements as he heads towards the door. He can’t look at her.

“You know you can show a genuine emotion. I’m going to start thinking you’re a sociopath.”

“That wasn’t enough  _ genuine emotion _ for you?” he gestures outward as though what happened in his mother’s kitchen was in the other room.

She shakes her head. “Not even close. This is grief, Ben, the more normal you are acting the worse you are dealing with it.”

“Just stop.” He covers his face in his hands.  _ “Enough. _ I started today thinking that dog had died years ago, and now all this is back.”

“What is back?”

“This...this...shit.”

He glares at her, seating himself heavily on the couch. “I was free of it. And you dragged me back.”

“Maybe I thought it would mean something to say goodbye this time.”

She stands in his living room while he tries to hide that his body is still  _ pulsating _ with anger. Her voice is very calm.

Like she’s guiding him down a tough trail. 

“Sit still,” she whispers, shedding her jacket. “I’m going to do something a little unorthodox.”

He stares dubiously at her; but she strips anyway. He bounces his knee with a force that shakes the coffee table. But methodically, she undresses down to her underwear. 

There’s a few minutes of silence. She breathes. He tries to. There’s a gentle rain against the window. 

“Ben,” she says quietly after a while, covering her mouth, but it’s not like she’s talking to him at all. Just the concept-

-the memory-

-Of Ben.

_ “Ben,” _ and her face crumples.

“I’m right here,”

“Shut the fuck up,” she returns just as easily as it slid out of his mouth in the car earlier. She will only tell him once. They do this her way, or she leaves. 

He sits back. Silent. 

She paces the room in a slow circle, breathing heavily. He’s seen her work herself up to tears from nothing before, but this is more exploratory, meditative. She is actively changing the reality around her. She is not summoning a ghost, worrying about a sick dog, crying over a movie. 

She is picturing...

“Ben,” she whines again, like she can’t find him, like he isn’t here. Her arms go around her body.

He makes a fist. He wants to go to her so badly, but she’s making a point, and slowly. 

She crawls on her hands and knees to his feet, but doesn’t touch him. They’re moving slowly, the tears down her face, but it’s like crying over something that already happened.

Something she couldn’t change.

“Ben,” she takes a steadying breath, “I miss you.”

_ “I’m...right here…” _ but he feels unsure; like he’s the ghost in his own life. 

Her face crumples in a sob, like she hasn’t even heard him. “I need you here.”

“Breathe, sweetheart,” he deadpans, but he’s riveted at the sight of her trembling chest.

She just sobs harder, like she’s intentionally ignoring any cue he can give her, any way he can step back and help. 

Rendering him helpless. 

Gone. 

The crafty bitch. 

The absolutely psychotic wonder of her. 

She is role-playing his death. 

She is mourning him _ to his face. _

He leans back on the couch, gritting his teeth as she trembles at his feet. 

“I can’t look at anything without being reminded of you and I’m angry, I’m so fucking angry, and I feel empty inside,” she hiccups, but surges through it like she has to talk to his ghost or his memory or the entire unknowable universe. His bare little thing, shaking like a leaf, and he feels that it’s true. She rests her head back on the coffee table, opening up for him to watch her, trapped in the world without him, and there’s nothing he can do.

“I  _ love you, _ Ben. And there’s so much I didn’t say. Why didn’t I-”

Her shoulders lift helplessly, shaking her head. Her eyes are clouded. He wants to say  _ I love you too, _ but she’s not talking to  _ him. _ This isn’t information for him, in this room, for him to file away in the context of normal.

“I wish I was  _ there,” _ she crumples up, her knees to her chest, “why wasn’t I with you?”

He tenses up. “Stop.”

“You must have felt so alone, why didn’t I-”

“Enough.”

“I never wanted you to feel like you weren’t loved. You mattered to me.”

There’s a nervous rumble in his throat.

“Rey, I get it, you can knock it off.”

She slices with the precision of a surgeon, but her rant is no longer  _ her _ internal monologue:

“I get angry. I don’t face things. I feel too much and I try to seal it up and when it comes out, I just crack.” 

“I know you see me,” he whispers.

She keeps pushing through like he didn’t speak “I do hurtful things because I’m grieving and I’m hurt because I feel so much more than I let myself show and I take these things out on people I care about.”

_ “I know you can see me.” _

He’s shaking. 

Sensing he needs someone to hold his hand, she silently climbs into his lap. But she doesn’t otherwise look at or acknowledge him. She lowers her lips to his ear as he struggles underneath her, making high, keening, anxious noises. She combs her fingers soothingly into the hair at the base of his skull, cradling him to lean into her.

“I can’t live with the regret, because it is too fucking sad what I could have had in this life. So I’m angry at myself. I pretend I’m angry at the world but the whole time it’s me. I  _ lost _ you.”

He clutches her hips.

“I’m not ready…”

“Ben,” she is the only one close enough to do this. He is the only one who can: “it is madness to pretend you can designate this to a time that you’re ready. You can’t control it. You are only hurting yourself.”

He buries his face in her neck, his whole body tensing like he’s been struck by lightning. He wants to fight it, but he can’t hold on-

“We didn’t talk.”

His chest is quivering against hers. She steps off the gas. Hovering over him, motionless. 

He needs to come back from the dead on his own.

“We didn’t talk for years,” he stares at the freckles on her collarbones. “And how do you end that silence? It would seem, disingenuous…”

He can feel her dissatisfaction with that answer, but he grips her tighter, “we missed out on so much. Of course I fucking regret it. But I can’t go back…”

She tilts his head back. He tries to blink his open expression back to a neutral one, but she croons, combing his hair out of his eyes, kissing his forehead. Dragging him out in the open as he did so many times for her.

“Remember what Finn said? It’s not too late.”

“How?”

“Because I’m here,” she kisses his cheek, his brow, his lips, “you’re not alone. It’s okay.”

“I missed him even before he was dead, and I still did nothing.”

And he collapses under her hands. Shaking and trembling. The grief, both stale and fresh, bubbling out of his eyes and he cries for the first time since he was a kid. He was really close to this. Closer than ever. She just had to be there to see it and nudge it, all she really did was nudge it, swollen and ready to bleed. 

“I don’t know why I didn’t go. The few times I couldn’t hold back the thought of how scared he must have felt in the end, and I wasn’t there because I was a fucking coward, Rey, my vision whites out. I can’t-”

“I understand,” she just rocks him, arms around his shoulders, head in her hands. Not letting go. “You were scared too. You were angry,  _ I know-” _

She takes a deep breath. “I know about the violence. I know Ben. And I know you’ll never hurt me.”

He tenses up, because even though she sounds sure of herself; he’s not.

There were too many times he was way out of control, and she deserves better than him.

“I can’t feel these things and feel like I can still be close to you without…”

She’s shaking her head, trying to guide him back to the path. “No. No. Suppressing these feelings is going to make you like that again. Please. Listen to me. You have to let this out or it’s going to consume you.”

“Fuck,” he rests his head all the way back, too scared to let go of her. “Fuck, fuck  _ fuck-” _

“Sweetheart, you’re trembling,” she combs his hair out of his face and touches his forehead like she’s checking for a fever, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

He does what he's secretly wanted to do for longer than he's even known her; he holds her close and _wails._

It feels _so good_ to let it out. 

“That dog is like the last piece of him here,” he's got her in a vice grip, his breath shuddering. Rey kisses the path of his tears. She rubs his chest as it jerks with the exertion of his breathing. She listens. “He’s going to be gone. He’s already gone. There isn’t anything left.”

“That’s not true.  _ You’re _ here.”

She can’t fix it. She knows it’s not something you can fix. 

He trembles and pulls her as close as humanly possible. Her warm, alive, soft skin in his arms. 

“I don’t have to pretend to cry when I think about losing you,” she fists a hand in his hair, tightening her thighs around his hips. “I’ve been so miserable without you; even though I spent most of our time together crying in your presence.”

He feels so fragile as she touches her fingertips to his face. 

“I don’t want to be alone.”

“Everything you’ve done for me- I can do it for you,” she cradles his cheek. “I can Ben, and I will.”

“I want my dad back.”

“I know.”

“And I can’t save my fucking dog.”

His tears run down her neck. She can’t fix it. She can’t make it better; he was deluding himself to pretend he could do that for her. But he gets it. He gets why she wanted to pretend.

“We’ll go back, okay? We can go back to Leia’s in an hour. I fucked up. I should have taken time alone with you first to be gentle. I’m so sorry.”

He’s not angry anymore.

It was maybe the only way this could go.

That sounds better than what he thought he would do. Which is sulk around his apartment and pretend it wasn’t happening.

“Shitty date night; me and a dying dog.”

She nods, kissing him. “The worst.”

“I want to be with you.”

Rey starts crying, really crying, because she was the one holding it in this time. “Okay.”

“For real,” he swallows, his arms tensing as he grips her ass, “for real but also like  _ right now.” _

“Okay,” she shudders against him, letting him shudder, so spent already, against her body as she strips off what little she’s wearing. She’s so warm against him, breathing and writhing and so goddamn alive. “Can you handle me?”

He laughs, that ragged laughter that feels good because he’s in love with her even when he feels like this. “Be gentle, sweetheart.”

“Breathe with me,” she instructs when his own airways quiver open and shut too erratically. She presses her brow to his, her hand on his chest and another clasping one of his hands to her chest. 

And until he can feel that motion in unison, shallow and steady, does she take him inside her.

Her hips close over hips, her pelvis rising as they both free his cock with succinct teamwork. She strokes him, and the heightened, fragile sensitivity there makes his head fall into her chest with a muffled cry. It feels like so much. He gets her addiction to this. Her tending to him, softly stroking his cock while he whimpers underneath her. 

“Let go,” she pleads as her knees dig into the couch cushions; scrambling on his lap. He practically folds her in half when he cums. He pants, clutching those wild hips, and throws himself over for her.

Maybe forever.

 

* * *

 

 

He didn’t think he’d be spending the morning after with another cup of grief coffee; but it’s bleary light and tear-stained cheeks and a lot of sad, pathetic smiles at whoever currently has Chewie snuggled under their hand. It was a warm night, so he and Rey slept on the patio furniture, a cramped, ugly wicker couch, with Chewie between them.

He had sort of pictured this afterglow in his bed, but they never reached his bed. They went back to the house last night. 

Poe and Finn are carrying Chewie to the car. It should be his job, but they’re still here and they want to help, and they all loved that dog, so this can happen in shifts. 

He’s the one going to the vet with Leia. He'll be the one to carry him into the building.

It’s going to suck. It’s the hardest thing to do. He has to see the life leave him and think about all those years he stayed away. 

How excited Chewie had been to see him again, after all that time wasted. 

Rey’s put herself to work googling nearby, rentable cabins. She might build one with her bare hands over a weekend to make this right; and he lets her plan, kissing her head and feeling raw and squeezing her hand when he needs them to leave the room so he can cry on her shoulder.

What's going on between them, it's not secret anymore. Not with her head on his shoulder, or him gripping her hand when he's too close to tears and needs to get some air. 

He's glad of it. He wants everyone to know.

Leia touches his shoulder to let him know they're leaving. He grabs her hand and really squeezes, like he's actually meaning to touch her. 

He used to be his mother's son. He never likes to admit he misses it; her dry sense of humor, her steadiness, her toughness.

Everyone told him he didn’t have to go with her. It was a lot to take. 

He wants to be there for his family this time.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [because I am a sociopath: here's a crying playlist I made especially for this fic.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1GwwKNK3FErBfoFS93O33D)

**Ben,**

**I have to die.**

**This is the hardest thing in life to accept, if you want a real story ask your Mother how I already did this once before in the 1980’s, but** **only** **I think that story is funny now so fair warning. I thought that time would make this a piece of cake when they gave me the news, but it’s even harder the second time around.**

**I enter into this knowing that I am going to die, and that I can’t change what happened in the past. There is no other way this can end but the way it was meant to. And I don’t know how that’s going to affect you.**

**You and Leia are a lot alike, and how I’ve treated you both has proven how little I understood her: and how it was my fault that I never really understood you. You and Leia are strong. She’s strong enough that I thought she could be the same person when I wasn’t around. Even though loving her made me better, I never trusted myself enough to assume the same for her. Instead I assumed that it didn’t hurt her when I left for months at a time, because she kept going and doing amazing things with her life. She didn’t need me. I didn’t think that she’d rather have me around, I just knew it was true she could go on normally if I wasn’t.**

**And you had her, who was so much more capable than me. To see that same strength in my son was a badge of pride for a long time. I’m still proud of that, in you, even when I want to strangle you.**

**Even if it’s there because I wasn’t there for you.**

**My absence wasn’t fair to her, and it was embarrassing when I look back and see I did the same to you. I was not the most capable parent. But I want you to know that I love her. And I love you. And that’s how I intend to go.**

**I forgive you, Ben. I hope someday you can forgive me.**

 

**Dad**

 

* * *

 

 

Ben had not read the letter in the year since his father died. He never opened it.

Contemplated destroying it in the envelope.

His father posted it in the fucking mail, both Solo men being intensely private in the most inconvenient of ways, so it was Ben’s burden to bear alone.

Ben wasn’t sure his mother even knew his father had tried one more time to reach out to him.

It sat unopened in his closet for a year.

He was too scared to tell anyone else it existed.

Until Rey.

Until one morning, he finds himself woken up in an odd mood.

It’s been six months since they met on that Autumn camping trip.

He’s _belonged_ to her since then, but things have only been official since about December, and trying to parse out “normal” from the way it started has taken some time.

The first week they start acting like a couple, he gets her a genuine sheepskin blanket; she cries.

It stays in his apartment. So does she, most of the time.

He likes to rub against on her feet and her back and her breasts when she cuddles him, the comforting feeling of the material is a great way to encourage her to be more naked all the time. He likes to wrap her up in it and hold her.

She likes to remember to fling it to the floor so nothing bad happens during sex that would ruin the material.

They’re a great team, like that.

There’s still a lot of crying. They don’t even _think_ about sex for weeks after Chewie was put down; but there is a lot of crying. A lot of cuddling. A lot of lazy days around his apartment and brisk walks through the woods and looking at ghost plants and getting dinner together with that bleary-eyed, newborn-skinned feeling of being re-immersed into the real world.

After three months, he took her back to her camp.

That was a hard day.

After the three hour drive, they walked through the empty cabins, Rey clutching his hand for dear life; on the off-season the place look frighteningly dead. He kept clearing his throat and apologizing for this _very bad idea_ he had to please her until she shook her head slightly.

“No, it’s just,” she stared at a cabin in front of her, “I never got to go back and see it, after they rejected my application. I just...don’t know how to feel, really.”

It is weird to enter this place with her, when he’s never seen it, and she’s brought him into it a few hundred -very tasteless- pretend times in their bed:

_-Baby no, we have to get you back to the girl’s side of the lake before anyone knows you’re not in your cabin, this is so wrong but I want you, Rey don’t put me in your mouth oh fuck-_

The arousal it causes to burn between them has found a deeper meaning; she wants to let go and be cared for, he wants to care for her. Be the best thing for her. Her concerned, doting camp counselor who wouldn't let her cry alone in the woods. Who relents, who gives her what she wants, who fulfills that fantasy for a broken teen with no adults that intervened. 

It's fucked up between two adults, bordering psychopathic, but it makes sense to them.

But being there was real; he saw the side of camp she would sneak back to in their pretend camper/counselor escapades, he saw the dock that she learned to swim from, the dining hall that served her grilled cheese made inexplicably on sheet pans that she swore she wanted as her last meal.

He saw her stroke her hand over a cabin wall and sob because she found her name carved there along with the scratches that marked how many summers she’d spent in this place that were made by her tiny hands.

And because she could never go back the same way.

It was everything; and not just the good parts. He's grateful he's not just skimming off the good parts now.

He had called the office about their visit (he had the unmentioned, perverse fantasy of taking her in one of those bunks, but she was a little too raw for that on this visit) and investigated a few other things.

The camp was open to hosting events on the off season.

Like weddings.

But not getting the holy grail of their favorite sexual fantasy was not ruinous of the trip. Rey kissed him almost more than he could stand and was a puddle of affection and gratitude for the following weeks; draped over him like a horny koala.

And she holds her breath when he tells her about the events that campsite can host.

"I'll think about it," she tells him in the car ride home, her head tossed back in the seat, as wily a passenger as she was when they met. 

And he as stealthily touchy as he was then.

She takes him camping. Often. It is not _Ben Solo Glamping;_ he’s still planning that trip. There are yurts involved.

They spend most of those weekends making love in his state-of-the-art sleeping bag, in the tent that is only meant to be shared by them together. There’s campfire smell and the burning aftertaste of bug spray to their kisses. They're still amazing. She tells him ghost stories in such a way that he is up half the night clinging to her.

There’s being alone with her, walking through the woods, and feeling like she will protect him. She is teenage Ben standing between him, a bear, and bravely wielding only a flashlight. 

It’s a Sunday when he tells her about the letter. Rey is practically living with him by now (his complex has a great walking path he never used before her) and it’s one of those rainy days where they wake up and don’t talk for maybe an hour or two. Stretching the silence in a languorous way, adoring in unspoken rhythm. It’s like a game; can they coordinate cooking a breakfast without speech? If she kisses him abruptly, does he have to know why?

Can they figure it out?

They’re eating, she’s chewing so goddamned loudly: it is calm because they had sex before getting out of bed that wasn’t prefaced by tears.

It did...end with them though.

Which was new. They could have sex _without_ one of them crying, they did now, often. But never had a soft, quiet encounter ended in tears bubbling out of her this way. It was the reverse order, crying not initiating but responding.

Without him having to plead with her, gently coax her _‘sweetheart you can tell me’_ when she’s had a bad day, or flipping her over onto her knees and growling out those coarse but effective observations that have Rey explode, red-faced, clenching on him like she’s trying to shut him inside her body forever.

But just him rocking his hips into her, looking at her, _loving her;_ tears bead in her eyes and run down, and she clutches his arms like she needs him. Her thighs are tight around his hips, her hands shaking, clinging, begging.

And neither of them speak for the entirety of it. They just stare at each other, breathless.

Needing.

Never had thrusting into the woman he loved turned her into a human tremble of emotion. His cock in her. His chest steady against hers. His kiss on her lips.

And he didn’t find that there was anything he needed to say. He nuzzled her soft cheek, kissed her attentively, and made some crooning sounds in her ear when her whines made him ache. But she didn’t have to explain, and he didn’t have to pry.

When they cum, narrowly around the same time, it's an acutely poignant sensation. With him coming inside and her drowning him in her walls, they both feel equally flooded, red-faced, owned. He presses his brow to hers when his body lowers down over her, she holds him to her breast. He can tell that she's still crying. She can tell that he's never going to fucking leave this woman.

At the kitchen table, she’s dressed in one of his tee shirts, drinking coffee and planning out a guided Flora and Fauna Tour she’s leading once a week in the spring. And by planning: scribbling on a section of newspaper he was going to _try_ to read later, but she’s so focused he doesn’t complain as she scrawls over the text, he’ll just find the article online.

They succeeded at bacon in silence. He did. She made toast, and crunches it messily in her mouth, crumbs all over her face, and he’s not really reading as much as he’s watching the flickers that move her from motion to motion. What makes her alive.

“There was a letter.”

Rey goes still for a moment, ears perked, the first cut into the substantial silence they’ve built up since falling asleep the night before. The first spoken sentence is always the most significant. 

She seems to try to understand what he said, scrambling, sitting up in her seat to look him head on.

Her eyes are so soft and open.

“What did it say?”

He sets down his paper.

“I never read it.”

The hand she has rested on the table curls into a restraining fist.

He can hear her breathe for a long time; the shake, the quick ones that follow, and the attempts to slow.

He hates admitting it as much as she hates hearing it. He can feel her trying not to lash out at that, it’s an instinct of anger, and a valid one.

“Do you know…” her mouth is dry from the toast. She paws crumbs off her lips, looking at her lap. “Do you know what I would have _done_ for a letter?”

She's crying again. It's a different kind. It doesn't make him feel needed. It makes him feel understood.

“I know, sweetheart,” he says sadly, and he goes to the closet where it was locked away inside and retrieves it.

 

* * *

 

 

“We’re having a bonfire.”

His head is pressed to Rey’s belly when she makes the call. She just cradles him. He can hear Finn and Poe’s casual responses; _‘yeah, sure, why do you make it sound like someone died?’_

It’s been a few months since Chewie, so he can understand their confusion.

The letter is opened on the coffee table. They read it a few hours ago. She read with him; his request.

 _I know it’s hard_ Rey had said gently _I know it feels like there’s a final piece left of him alive as long as you don’t open it. Ben, your father wanted you to read this, you have to open it. Imagine dying without being heard._

It is painfully obvious why it has taken him this long to tell her. And that he only did because he was finally ready.

They have not moved from the couch since.

He is thinking about the impossible circumstance that a disease choses the person you love with such tenacity that they are gone. He is picturing the needle sneaking into Chewie's fur, entering the dog's skin, and the quiet with which he was gone. 

About how familiar his dad's pats on the shoulder felt, how distinct; and how he'll never feel them again.

“We’re having a bonfire for Han,” Rey rocks forward onto the balls of her feet when Ben pulls her closer, standing in front of his seat on the couch. She curls his fingers in his hair to stroke his scalp. It’s only the way she does this that reminds him how tender a human skull is, how fragile, and the touch makes his spine tingle with that knowledge and the shared sense of it with her. “Ben never got to say goodbye.”

 

* * *

 

 

It’s pretty cold still, at night. Especially by the water. They drink beers, as Han would have wanted. Leia opted out, said it was an event for young people, but Ben knew better, and was awed that sometimes even his mother didn’t know what to do with grief.

He calls her friend Amilyn to take her out to dinner that night, just in case. So she’s not alone.

He focuses on unnecessarily warming Rey’s hands. She tolerates it, hers enveloped in his, until the sun goes all the way down, but after about twenty minutes of fussing over her not-cold fingers she pointedly holds them up to the raging fire in front of him as if to show how much easier that way was.

He shoves his hands in his pockets, leaning back in his lawn chair.

“What are we supposed to do?”

“We can say a few words,” she tries out carefully, but she sees his face pale even in the red firelight. He’s not ready for that quite yet, “or we can sing ‘Taps’.”

He fidgets. Poe and Finn are there, quiet and supportive, drinking beer and watching the flames, but this all seems...more for Ben than for Han.

He doesn’t know how to feel about that.

“I’m not going to sing it.”

“Okay,” Rey swallows more beer, getting up to look out at the water.

He sighs, frustrated, and gets up to join her. It’s a beautiful night, piney and chilled, the kind of night where…

His dad would point out the stars to him, during family camping trips. When it was too dark to read comic books and just pretend he was at home.

She links her arm up with him. Looking at him hopefully.

“Maybe I will.”

He places his hand over her arm, still linked in his.

“Okay.”

She begins.

Very quietly.

_Day is done_

_Gone the sun_

Finn, recognizing the song, having sung it with Rey every closing campfire every summer and definitely during the one where he braved his first kiss, joins in with her on the second line. Two bodies cluster behind them; Poe and Finn, looking at the sparks dancing in a reflection on the water.

Poe doesn’t know the words, Ben knows enough that he would sing if he could but he just _can’t,_ so just Finn and Rey bear them.

Poe is crying. Ben can hear it. He was always better with his emotions than Ben. Less angry. Less destructive.

Tentatively, Ben touches Poe’s shoulder.

From the way Poe reacts; it is a lot like the way Han used to.

Poe blinks back tears, hands shoved uselessly in his pockets. 

They have all lost Han.

“If I could trade places with you _-if I could have never seen him sick-_ I would have.”

He does something he thought he’d never do and crushes Poe into a hug.

"It was awful," Poe continues, his entire body shaking.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. You should tell me about it someday. Kick my ass, too.”

Poe hugs him back. "You're really due for it. Love you, Ben."

"Love you too."

Rey and Finn politely keep singing. They’re holding hands. Crying as well, because they miss Han in different ways.

It feels almost like he is here, which is impossible, but does not stop Ben from crying himself.

_From the lakes_

_From the hills_

_From the sky_

_All is well_

_Safely rest_

_God is nigh_

It echoes quietly along the water, the sound halving itself as it leaves them until it exists at a frequency that cannot be heard at all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> wooo another WIP because I. Am. Trash. And because you guys send me prompts that I end up really liking and wanting to make into full stories.
> 
> This time of year was always post-summer-camp ennui and despair for me, and since I missed my seasonal window for a camp counselor AU I was thinking about; here's the fucking saddest post-camp ennui and despair story I can think of. 
> 
> Kylo has a kink for Rey tears. That's going to be a thing in this story. 
> 
> Rey's going to cry a lot. 
> 
> Kylo is going to cry...more than he likes to admit.


End file.
